It shouldn’t really be happening, but it is. More and more companies are putting SLAs or target deadlines on their assurance functions to finish a risk assessment before a new vendor gets onboarded.
The reason is easy to understand. Everyone wants their new third-party service up and running as soon as possible. And from the business side, the whole risk assessment process looks like it takes forever.
Why Deadlines On Assurance Teams Backfire
We get the frustration. But putting a hard deadline on security, risk, legal or privacy teams is counterproductive, and it can backfire.
Put a timeline on any process and people start optimising for the timeline. The goal quietly shifts from “assess this vendor properly” to “close this assessment before the SLA runs out”. Answers get skimmed instead of challenged. Follow-up questions don’t get asked. The assessment gets completed, but the real assurance work doesn’t.
That’s how a sloppy process ends up approving a vendor that should have been flagged. And the company carries that risk long after the SLA dashboard turned green.
Speed vs Due Diligence
At the same time, nobody wants to slow the business down. A good third-party service can genuinely improve productivity and the way teams work. Waiting weeks for a sign-off has a real cost too.
So the answer isn’t “no deadlines, ever”. It’s finding the balance between onboarding new services fast and doing vendor due diligence that actually means something.
AI Does The Work, Humans Lead
With 3rdComply, we take over the most time-consuming part of third-party risk management for security and privacy teams. As long as the vendor has the information needed, the AI completes the assessment in under an hour.
But we still strongly recommend that the risk officer, security officer or procurement officer reviews the AI’s answers. These are the people who know what the company actually needs. They work with the company’s policies, procedures, standards and baselines day in, day out. The judgment call belongs to them.
3rdComply isn’t built to make that judgment for humans. We deliberately leave it to the experts. Even in the managed service, where we review the AI output on our clients’ behalf, a human still leads the process.
That’s our principle: AI does the work, humans lead. Humans lead the process, the quality and the decision.
What This Looks Like In Practice
We can’t speak for every assurance function. But for the security and privacy teams using 3rdComply as their companion, assessments are completed end to end in under 6 hours.
The AI part takes around an hour. The rest is the human part: reviewing, making judgment calls, coordinating with the vendor or the business. All in, still under 6 hours, without cutting corners on quality.
Fast, But Not Sloppy
An SLA on your assurance functions might look great on paper and great for speed. It just shouldn’t come at the cost of quality.
With 3rdComply, we want to help teams keep that quality and still hit the timeline, whether the pressure comes from the board or from the procurement process.
If this sounds familiar in your organisation, let’s have a chat. 3rdcomply.com #NoMoreBlindSpot