Challenge

Sutton Bank, headquartered in Attica, Ohio with close to $828 million in assets, is a community bank for the agricultural area of the state. As a highly regulated organization, the bank has a dedicated third-party risk team committed for ensuring their third-party risk management program meets all regulatory requirements and enables them to proactively mitigate third-party risks.

Prior to implementing Venminder, the bank had contracted with multiple technology software providers to meet their program’s needs. As those systems did not integrate or “talk” to one another, it made their program difficult to scale and mature, as well as being time consuming and cumbersome.

“We were using one provider to house documents and another to send and complete questionnaires. Ultimately, it was not an efficient use of our time and it was becoming harder to keep track of what we did have, what we didn't have and in what application they were housed in,” said Jolene Houpt, Third-Party Risk Analyst.

Solution

The team at Sutton Bank set out with the goal of deciding on the best provider where they could centralize all of their third-party risk processes, have the capabilities to scale their program as the bank continued to grow and streamline processes to meet necessary regulation requirements. Following a diligent review, the team chose the Venminder software platform as it provided the ability to house contracts and documentation, send and manage questionnaires, and complete risk assessments, in addition to other modules like Vendor Onboarding, where they could get their business units more involved. The Sutton Bank team also partnered to reduce their workload by having the Venminder team provide services, including, document collection, vendor business continuity assessments, financial health assessments and more.

Result

“Venminder has helped us revamp the entire program and move away from other applications to become much more efficient,” said Third-Party Risk Manager, Chris Sherman. “The amazing thing is, we are in a place where other business units can also use Venminder to check on the status of things independently instead of relying on us to check into that for them. That’s been really helpful, and the general feedback from everyone has been very positive.”

As a highly regulated bank, the team has already received positive feedback that highlights their achievements in scaling and driving efficiency in their program.

“We have received feedback during external audit exams that stated our documents were easy to find and provided them with what they were looking for. In addition, Venminder itself was easy to navigate, so that itself has been a big plus.”

In summarizing the bank’s experience with Venminder, Chris concluded, “Venminder’s customer service has been outstanding, and that's been the biggest thing. I look at our relationship with Venminder as a partnership – I truly feel like Venminder has a vested interest in our success, just as we do in Venminder succeeding. I would definitely recommend Venminder to other organizations to manage third-party risk.”