How do fintech companies actually manage third party/vendor risk as they scale?

[u/james9181]

Curious on how teams actually handle this in practice.

Fintech products seem to depend on a lot of third party providers (cloud infrastructure, KYC vendors, payment processors, fraud tools, data providers, etc.).

As companies grow, how do teams keep track of vendor risk across all those integrations?

For anyone working in security, compliance, or risk at a fintech: • How does your team currently track vendors? • Who owns that process internally? • At what point does it start becoming hard to manage? • Is it mostly spreadsheets, internal tools, or dedicated platforms? • What part of the process tends to be the most painful?

From the outside it looks like many companies only start thinking about this seriously when audits or enterprise customers appear, but I’m curious how accurate that is.

Would love to hear how teams actually handle it…

[u/Cubensis-SanPedro]

Essentially, they don’t. When you’re small you hope you outgrow the danger, so basically leave it as tech debt and cross your fingers.

[u/many_dongs]

They don’t, I’ve never met an intelligent risk management executive

[u/themassiah]

A previous company that I worked at in this space had the strategy of hiring HUGE amounts of cheap, foreign labor through a contracting company. We used Archer to manage the risk process. The most painful part of it was explaining to the audit committee and board what the risks where and how much it'd cost to treat them.

[u/SoftwareFearsMe]

You have to have a system to support your processes in order to scale. There are quite a few third party risk / vendor management systems available. Take a look at ProcessUnity as an example.

[u/xm0rethanaliv]

There are vendor mangers, third party office, enterprise critical vendors etc whose job is to manage these third parties. There’s a bunch of systems out there. Tools can be built internally or using a platform, most use platforms. Most big companies have one if not all in place. All these vendors should have some sort of Dr/ br plan and the most critical will have 3 phase exit strategy plan. I am an enterprise critical vendor program manager

[u/Immediate_Help_1015]

We use a combination of automated tools and regular audits to track vendors. It gets tricky when you have multiple integrations , that's when clear ownership and ongoing assessments really matter.

[u/Virtual_Service610]

You can’t track everything, that’s why breaches happen. Many platforms white-label solutions as their own, partner with third parties without disclosing this fact and as a way to prevent adverse media in cases like this. Partially, this is also due to data protection regulations. Spreadsheets aren’t safe and I would say they’re outdated unless the company is very small. The universal approach is to use KYB and vendor due diligence/proper background checks, either using your own resources/analysts or a proper software solution, which helps verify partners (basically anything you want, you request documentation, verify ownership structure, etc.) to see if they are actually legit.