Working with a vendor like Strunk is the key to establishing a successful vendor management program

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Increasingly, financial institutions are outsourcing to benefit from reduced costs, enhanced flexibility, and improved efficiency while optimizing their resources and expertise. When a financial institution opts to outsource a task, its board of directors must ensure effective oversight and implement adequate controls. To create a robust vendor management program, the board should take into account the following activities.

Initially, the board of directors must define clear goals and objectives for their vendor management program. This includes determining the organization’s specific needs and requirements, assessing potential vendors, negotiating contracts, and overseeing vendor performance. Once established, the financial institution can formulate policies and procedures for the vendor management program. It’s crucial to devise a thorough plan that encompasses the entire vendor management process, from vendor selection to contract termination. Strunk’s Policy Manager software serves as a structured, centralized source of truth for your financial institution’s vendor management policies. Additionally, Policy Manager can document all procedures related to vendor management, encompassing links to policies, assigned responsibilities, automated change logging, and multiple file attachments.

After outlining the goals and objectives for a financial institution’s vendor management program, it is beneficial to employ vendor management software to enhance operations. Strunk’s vendor management software simplifies the automation of vendor management processes. This tool helps you organize your reviews and offers insights into the products and services provided by vendors. Furthermore, it acts as a contract repository and issues reminders for contract renewals. Our software also aids in conducting gap analyses of vendor contracts to identify any discrepancies.

Next, it’s crucial to carry out risk assessments to determine the risks associated with each vendor. Strunk’s vendor manager software will help you proactively manage vendor risk through assessments and tiering. This approach allows your financial institution to prioritize higher-risk vendors, enabling more frequent and thorough monitoring of these vendors. Once your financial institution identifies the risks linked to a vendor, it is crucial to be aware of the controls the vendor has implemented to manage those risks. Strunk’s vendor survey facilitates this process and helps you comprehend the vendor’s potential residual risks.

In a vendor management program, conducting due diligence on each vendor is crucial. You should evaluate aspects such as their financial stability, reputation, understanding of banking regulations, and overall performance. Strunk Vendor Management can streamline this process through our monitoring system and document retention for due diligence.

If it’s vital for your financial institution to collaborate with a skilled vendor who delivers dependable service and comprehends regulatory requirements for your automated vendor management process, reaching out to Strunk is key. We are here to offer consulting and the necessary tools to establish a successful vendor management program.

How can Strunk’s software help with your vendor management program?

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Regulators take compliance with vendor management regulations seriously due to the critical role third-party vendors play in delivering products and services. Using third-party services can increase the risk of a banking organization, but this does not mean that the organization can neglect its responsibility to perform all activities in a safe and sound manner. It is the responsibility of the organization to ensure compliance with all applicable laws and regulations, including those related to consumer protection and security of customer information. What exactly are the Regulators looking for in a Vendor Management program? Regulators will look for your program to have structure, be consistent, and have accountability. Strunk’s software can be your perfect solution to achieve your objectives. Let’s take a closer look at how it can help you.

The first thing that needs to be accomplished is to have the right structure for your program. The financial institution needs to have a well-documented policy describing how your board and senior management intend to execute vendor management. Strunk’s Policy Manager Software can provide your financial institution with a structured, centralized single source of truth for your organization’s policies. You can also use Policy Manager to document all of your procedures, including links to policies, ownership responsibilities, automated change logging, and multiple file attachments. If your financial institution does not currently have a vendor management documented policy, Strunk can start you off with our recommended standard policy.

Next, the financial institution must establish a consistent framework for implementing the policy that was established. Strunk’s Vendor Manager software can streamline and standardize the entire process. The Vendor Manager software is designed to transform a complicated process into a more organized and self-documenting workflow. It helps to streamline and automate the process, making it more efficient and easier to manage.

The financial institution must be accountable for its vendor management program. Strunk’s Risk Assessor software can assist in identifying what risk your organization must consider with your Vendor Management program, while also mapping what controls and procedures are in place for that risk.

Preparing for your next Vendor Management exam is crucial for your financial institution. Strunk offers several tools that can help you in this regard. While regulators do not expect perfection, they do expect progress and performance. By utilizing Strunk’s software and expertise, you can ensure that you are up-to-date and organized for your upcoming exam. This will make exam time much easier.

Save with Strunk’s Effective Risk Management Tools

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Strunk is best known for our fee income improvement programs, including Overdraft Privilege, Rewards Checking and Value Checking. Strunk is also well known for assisting community financial institutions with their risk management and compliance processes using our software.

Strunk offers five comprehensive, easy-to-use, and affordable compliance management tools:

Risk Assessor helps prepare comprehensive risk assessments consistent with regulatory or other requirements, in days, not weeks.

Policy Manager organizes all policy documents into a single database, mapped to the relevant standards and control procedures.

Controls Manager schedules tests of policy compliance and tracks test results.

Vendor Manager is a specialized tool for managing vendor risk that standardizes risk assessment methodology and organizes all vendor related documentation.

Issues Manager is a centralized database for tracking all compliance issues and incidents across your entire organization.

According to Dan Roderick, CEO, “Strunk’s Risk Manager solution brings efficiency to the process and allows our clients to focus on their highest areas of risk. The solution is comprehensive but simple to use, which is something I wish I’d had access to in my days as a banker.”

All our tools are securely and reliably hosted with Amazon AWS, making them available on a variety of devices from anywhere. Risk Manager facilitates remote work and will greatly enhance your internal control and risk management processes and save time – all for one low annual fee.

If you are paying another vendor an annual fee for any one of these tools today, invest just 30 minutes to review our solution suite. We can add valuable services – and may be able to SAVE you money as well! Check out our tools today: https://strunkaccess.com/compliance-software/

Risk Management Done Right

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Strunk is best known for our fee income improvement programs, including Overdraft Privilege, Rewards Checking and Value Checking. Most recently we have expanded our offering to assisting community financial institutions with their risk management and compliance processes using our software.

Strunk offers six comprehensive, easy-to-use and affordable compliance management tools:

Risk Assessor helps you prepare comprehensive risk assessments consistent with regulatory or other requirements, in days, not weeks.

Policy Manager organizes all your policies into a single database, mapped to the relevant standards and control procedures.

Controls Manager schedules tests of policy compliance and tracks test results.

Vendor Manager is a specialized tool for managing vendor risk that standardizes risk assessment methodology and organizes all vendor related documentation.

Issues Manager is a centralized database for tracking all compliance issues and incidents across your entire organization.

Skills Manager provides online testing and training to ensure employees are knowledgeable about your policies.

According to Dan Roderick, CEO, “Strunk’s Risk Manager solution brings efficiency to the process and allows our clients to focus on their highest areas of risk. The solution is comprehensive but simple to use, which is something I wish I’d had access to in my days as a banker.”

All our tools are securely and reliably hosted with Amazon AWS, making them available on a variety of devices from anywhere. Risk Manager facilitates remote work and will greatly enhance your internal control and risk management processes and save time – all for one low annual fee.

If you are paying another vendor an annual fee for any one of these tools today, invest just 30 minutes to review our solution suite. We can add valuable services – and may be able to SAVE you money as well!

Strunk at the ABA’s Virtual Risk Management Conference 2021

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We’re getting the hang of these virtual events at Strunk!  Strunk attended the ABA’s annual Risk Management conference last week. During the virtual event we hosted a virtual booth, met with many familiar and new faces via Zoom meetings and attended virtual sessions. We enjoyed the opportunity to connect with bankers across the country.

We welcomed the opportunity to discuss with attendees the latest features offered by our Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC) software Risk Manager, which includes six GRC tools – Risk Assessor, Policy Manager, Controls Manager, Skills Manager, Issues Manager and Vendor Manager.

A state of the industry was provided by Dr. Catherine Mann, currently the Global Chief Economist for Citibank. The session included an update on the economy, focusing on pandemic recovery in all key sectors. She also shared thoughts on key economic risks for financial markets and how this impacts risk mitigation efforts. The session also included a keynote address by Rob Nichols, President and CEO of the American Bankers Association.

Attendees had the opportunity to discuss post-pandemic risk management, among many other topics. Bankers were encouraged to reassess and modify risk management frameworks as a result of the pandemic, especially reviewing and adjusting risk appetites and associated metrics.

Congratulations to the winner of Strunk’s giveaway, a $100 gift card to Amazon – Linda Schnitzler of The Canandaigua National Bank and Trust Company!

We hope to see you all in person next year. Until then, stay well.

Strunk at the ABA’s Virtual Conference for Community Bankers 2021

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For the first time, Strunk attended the ABA’s annual Conference for Community Bankers virtually. During the virtual event we hosted a virtual booth, met with many familiar and new faces via Zoom meetings and attended virtual sessions. While a bit different than being together, it remains one of the most anticipated events of the year and we made the most of the connections with bankers and enjoyed seeing everyone.

We welcomed the opportunity to discuss with attendees the latest features offered by our Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC) software Risk Manager, which includes six GRC tools – Risk Assessor, Policy Manager, Controls Manager, Skills Manager, Issues Manager and Vendor Manager. Strunk’s Overdraft Program is always a hot topic of conversation and we were glad to discuss our approach with long-time clients and potential clients.

Attendees had the opportunity to hear from keynote speaker, former NBA star Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson in his session ‘The Power of Magic’. On top of his athletic notoriety, Magic is a driven and successful entrepreneur who shared what it takes to truly make an impact.

Another interesting session was hosted by Ron Shevlin of Cornerstone Advisors on the five forces shaping the banking industry today. He detailed how challenger banks, big tech, embedded finance, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrency are affecting our banks and provided areas of focus for community FIs.

Congratulations to the winner of Strunk’s giveaway, a $100 gift card to Amazon – Mayra Rinaldi of Columbia Bank!

We hope to see you all in person next year and to once again host the conference t-shirt station. Until then, stay well.

Ensuring Employee Compliance With Policies and Procedures

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Does your financial institution do annual employee reviews of compliance with your policies and procedures? If not you should. Training employees on specific areas of the bank is crucial to running a successful company and testing for product knowledge is critical to customer service.

All financial institutions have policies that are board approved on an annual basis and a set of procedures that are senior management approved. The question is do your employees know what the policies and procedure say and do they follow them?

In the middle of the 1980’s, the bank I worked at had a product knowledge contest with the winner receiving a trip to Las Vegas. There were three person teams and the questions came from all areas of the bank. So it was important to have a lending person, a retail person and an operations person on each team to have the correct answers. Needless to say, our team won.

Today, we don’t have product or policy knowledge contests but that doesn’t mean you can’t test your employees for knowledge of these. Strunk’s Skills Manager solution allows financial institutions to train your employees on products, procedures or policies. Then through the solution you can test their knowledge based on the training. Test results for each employee funnel up to one person responsible for the training. Many institutions use this for their security or ethics policy requiring their employees to take a test on an annual basis. Could Skills Manager help your financial institution?

Strunk Solution Fall 2020 Features

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With Strunk’s most recent release, clients can now utilize new features in Risk Assessor, Policy Manager, Controls Manager, Vendor Manager, Skills Manager and ODP Manager. We’ve been busy!

Risk Assessor now provides the ability to pull multiple bank UBPR Data into one single risk assessment. This will simplify assessments for multi-bank holding companies.

Criteria based auto assignment for reader and editor groups is now available in Policy Manager. Users are able to assign specific documents based on physical location or job title, where assignment of a set of policies and procedures could dynamically change based on these rules. We have also adjusted the way the policy acknowledgement is assigned. Admin users have the ability to request that users read a policy at a configurable number of days in the event that a policy is updated throughout the year, rather than just every 365 days. Users will be notified of necessary policies to review via email.

Controls Manager now supports notification of the group owner rather than simply the control owner. Alerts will be triggered any time a significant change or update is made to a control.

Clients will be excited to see the improvements to Vendor Manager reporting. Users can sort by a customized list of vendor types, vendor risk level and renewal year within all summary reports. Reports will also include whether or not the vendor survey has been completed and if not, what the current status is.

Skills Manager exams have historically been comprised of multiple choice or true false questions. We now support the option to have an open ended comment for specified questions.

Lastly, ODP Manager provides the ability to mark old status codes as inactive or deleted so they no longer show on reports, such as the Status Tracking Report.

If you would like more information on any of Strunk’s new features or products, please contact us at 800.728.3116 or support@strunklp.com.

Is it time for your company’s next SOC 2 examination?

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If your company is like Strunk, then a SOC 2 exam is an annual topic of conversation and the certification from your CPA firm is something you proudly provide your clients. At Strunk we have built a full-featured solution to help not only manage the policies your organization follows but to tie those policies back to the AICPA’s criteria and to your company’s own internal control procedures.

A SOC 2 audit can be time consuming, frustrating and burdensome. Strunk’s Policy Manager and Controls Manager modules can put much needed structure around this process. We keep on top of changes to the AICPA criteria so that you don’t have to. If changes need to be made to your existing policies as a result of any of these updates, you can easily address those within our software, and all modifications and approvals will be captured in our logs. The application will remind specific users within your organization when control activities need to be tested and the solution even supports breaking up this activity throughout the year so that your team is not focused on such a large task all at once.

The implementation with Strunk is extremely straightforward. Your company will submit your current policies for upload and creation within our system. If you are missing policies in any area we will provide you with a template document for you to customize but you will not need to start from scratch! We will work with your team to map these documents to the AICPA criteria in our solution.

Most companies are using Excel to track control activities. We ask that you simply provide this list of test procedures and we will set them up within the solution as well. Our Policy Map will provide a linked relationship from criteria to policies to controls. Once all of your company specific information has been uploaded and created we will host a training webinar for your team. It’s that simple.

Let Strunk help simplify and organize this process for you so that you can focus on what you do best – serving your clients.

Take advantage of new enhancements to Strunk’s Policy Manager

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This summer Strunk has been hard at work making value added changes to enhance all of our applications. Customers will be able to leverage the convenience and organization of Policy Manager now more than ever. Through our next release the solution will now include a suggestions feature, criteria based auto assignment and the ability to automatically make changes to users. Dan Roderick, Strunk CEO, said ‘we continue to improve our solutions monthly based on client input and are pleased to announce these latest updates’.

For users with view only access, we have added functionality to allow them to suggest changes to policy documents via a comment feature within the user interface. This will then allow editors or approvers the option to decide whether or not to implement the suggested changes.

Policy Manager will now support criteria based auto assignment for Reader and Editor Groups rather than administrators having to makes all policy assignments manually. The auto assignment will take place based on defined criteria including any combination of physical location, department, and job role. Assignment of a set of policies and procedures could dynamically change based on these rules.

Updates to user accounts has been streamlined with automation of user changes. To simplify adding new users and deactivating former employees, an automatic user file import can be set up. Once configured, a file containing all current users will be uploaded and processed via a scheduled task.

Policy Manager organizes your hundreds of policy documents spread across different computers and file systems into a single database. It provides a structured, single source of truth for your organization.

An independent certified public accountant has examined Strunk’s operations and found them to be in compliance with the AICPA’s Trust Service Principles. It was determined that Strunk meets the Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy criteria for SOC 2 established by the AICPA.