Credit unions, today, rely on an increasing number of 3rd party vendors to deliver quality services to their members. Having 30, 50, or even 100 vendors servicing components of their business, is not uncommon for an average institution. With so many vendors, the challenge of adequately evaluating and managing the risks can be overwhelming.

Following a string of publicized data breaches involving financial institution vendors, the FFIEC and NCUA have stepped in advising financial institutions to thoroughly assess the risk and appropriately manage their vendor relationships. Unfortunately, there has not been a consistent, widely adopted standard for doing so. Until now!

While managing the technical risks within credit unions has been accomplished reasonably well, managing the risk within independent company’s domains has been far more challenging. By leveraging the industry’s cooperative characteristics, the VMAlliance brings financial institutions together with solution providers, and the NCUA in an industry-wide shared-benefits consortium, to establish a standard method for addressing this challeng.

The VMAlliance defines industry acceptable practices, provides due diligence, and eliminates the redundancy and lack of consistency currently associated with vendor management solutions:

• evaluate vendors
• access industry standardized due diligence
• assess, monitor and report risk
• implement best practices
• and ensure compliance with NCUA requirements

By combining collaboration and management tools with shared resources, credit unions of all sizes will benefit. The VMAlliance provides a powerful, yet intuitive web-based access to an industry consortium. Credit unions can easily manage vendor relations, track contract details, contact information, set alerts, generate reports, manage risk inquiries, communicate with peers, and much more. All within and industry defined process.

Evaluating a new vendor? Search the VMAlliance Vendor Network to find vendors and immediately access due diligence information. Want more specifics on a vendor? Make a request through VMAlliance to generate a response under the agreed upon standards of the consortium. Curious what other users question about a vendor? Log on to the vendor’s VMAlliance User Forums. VMAlliance leverages the industry’s collective input to put structure and efficiency into vendor management.

From Disorder…..

…..to Standards, Convenience, and Efficiency