The administrative burden of third-party risk management has driven enterprises to offshore the work for decades. But the real issue was never headcount it was tooling.
Third-party risk management from a security perspective is not a new discipline especially in banking and financial services, where regulators have demanded structured vendor oversight for decades. Enterprises in these sectors have long understood the stakes: a breach at a supplier can be just as damaging as one in your own environment. And yet, despite all that maturity, the actual mechanics of doing TPRM have barely evolved. The work is still largely manual chasing vendors for questionnaire responses, reviewing stacks of policy documents, and cross-referencing answers against internal standards. It is time-consuming, repetitive, and costly enough that many large organisations have simply moved the problem offshore.
The offshoring reflex
Firms like Deloitte and KPMG alongside many enterprise TPRM teams themselves have built processing centres in India, the Philippines, Poland, and elsewhere to handle the administrative load at lower cost. On paper, this makes sense. Offshoring works well when the task is highly standardised: same input, same process, same output, reliably at scale.
But TPRM is not that task. And that’s the fundamental tension that offshoring has never quite resolved.
The problem was never that enterprises lacked people willing to do TPRM work. It was that the tools were never built to match how the work actually flows.
The standardisation trap
Every TPRM programme aspires to consistency standardised questionnaires, tiered risk frameworks, repeatable review cycles. But the reality is that each vendor assessment carries its own nuances. A cloud provider handling sensitive personal data is not assessed the same way as a facilities contractor. A critical fourth-party dependency surfaces mid-assessment and changes the risk profile entirely. A vendor’s security posture has shifted since last year’s review.
These nuances require judgment. And judgment cannot be fully offshored, templated away, or automated out of existence at least not with the tools most teams have been relying on.
| The old trade-off | What good looks like |
| Standardise fully → lose flexibility for edge cases | Standardised by default, flexible when needed |
| Keep flexibility → process becomes inconsistent and slow | AI handles the repeatable work at scale |
| Offshore the work → lose institutional context | Practitioners override where judgment is required |
| Keep it in-house → costs spiral | Affordable without sacrificing quality or control |
Where 3rdComply fits in
This is the gap 3rdComply was designed to close. The platform uses AI to automate as much of the TPRM process as possible scanning vendor documentation, answering assessment questions, and benchmarking responses against your internal policies. But crucially, it doesn’t lock practitioners out of the process.
TPRM officers can override the AI’s outputs at any point, accommodate the nuances that make one vendor relationship genuinely different from another, and apply their expertise where it matters most. Standardisation becomes the default; flexibility remains available whenever the assessment demands it.
The result is a process that can run fast and at scale without becoming rigid and without requiring a team of offshore analysts to keep it moving.
Not every organisation can absorb offshore costs. For enterprises that cannot justify the investment in large consulting-led TPRM programmes, 3rdComply offers a managed support service expert hands on the work when you need them, at a cost that doesn’t require a big-four budget.
The administrative burden of TPRM has always been real. But for too long it’s been treated as a resourcing problem, solved by adding more people in cheaper locations. The better solution is to give the people you have wherever they are tools that were actually built for the complexity of this work.
Ready to rethink your TPRM process? Schedule a conversation with the 3rdComply team.