How National Savings and Investments Secures Its Supply Chain for the Future

National Savings and Investments (NS&I) is one of the largest savings organizations in the UK with 25 million customers and more than £179 billion invested. Because of its unique status as both a retail savings organization and an arms-length government body, NS&I must meet public sector and financial services third-party risk management requirements aimed at protecting customer data.

Prevalent helped NS&I by simplifying and automating the process for managing suppliers and assessing their third parties, which resulted in significant time savings and a solid return on investment.

The Challenge: Manual Supplier Assessments

NS&I works with up to 250 suppliers in a normal year requiring everything from initial onboarding assessments to more than a third requiring annual statements of security assurance. The annual assurance process previously involved assessing suppliers against data, information and physical security requirements using a set of custom questions for suppliers to answer.

Complicating NS&I’s third-party risk management process was a bi-annual SYSC 8 internal audit that requires a layer of controls to ensure that outsourced partners are compliant with systems to protect customer data based on the regime that regulated financial institutions must have in place.

As a result, the manual, back-and-forth, labor-intensive process to assess their suppliers could not be sustained.

The Solution: The Prevalent Third-Party Risk Management Platform

NS&I was looking for a way to automate their third-party risk management process, making it less resource-intensive and more secure for vendors to submit their answers and evidence. To achieve this, NS&I turned to Prevalent.

Prevalent takes the pain out of third-party risk management (TPRM). Companies use our software and services to eliminate the security and compliance exposures that come from working with vendors, suppliers and other third parties. Our customers benefit from a flexible, hybrid approach to TPRM, where they not only gain solutions tailored to their needs, but also realize a rapid return on investment.