From Procurement to Platform: How Third-Party Risk Management Grew Up

Twenty years ago, vendor selection was largely a procurement affair. The big concerns were price, service levels and contractual protections, with perhaps a nod to information security in the boilerplate. A decade later, the financial-services regulators had their say, and “Third-Party Risk Management” (TPRM) was born. What began as a series of spreadsheets and checklists has since evolved into a core discipline — one that sits somewhere between compliance, security and supply-chain governance.

The long road from sourcing to stewardship

In the mid-2000s, most due-diligence exercises were episodic. A supplier was vetted once, approved, and then rarely looked at again. By the early 2010s, regulators such as the OCC and the FCA were warning that outsourcing did not transfer risk. Banks started building dedicated TPRM functions, separate from procurement, to run structured assessments, assign risk tiers and track remediation.

Then cloud computing, GDPR and a string of supply-chain breaches pushed the conversation further. Due diligence was no longer just about asking the right questions — it was about understanding how data flowed through multiple layers of subcontractors, and about maintaining continuous oversight rather than annual reviews.

Fast-forward to today, and many organisations are trying to knit procurement and TPRM back together again. The old silos are inefficient; the new goal is a single “third-party lifecycle” that covers sourcing, contracting, monitoring and exit in one joined-up process. Consultants are increasingly asked to help clients not only assess risk but orchestrate the underlying data, documents and workflows that make assessments repeatable and auditable.

The next stage: orchestration, not administration

That shift brings us to the present moment — and to a change in expectations for the software that supports these processes. The first generation of TPRM tools focused on questionnaire distribution and scoring. The second added workflow and reporting. The third, now emerging, treats the assessment process itself as infrastructure — something to be embedded into wider enterprise systems.

Modern teams want assessments that trigger actions elsewhere: opening service-desk tickets, updating CRM records, generating contract clauses, feeding risk dashboards. They want document automation and content-management capabilities to reuse the evidence they already hold, and they want APIs rather than exports. In other words, they want the TPRM platform to act as a conductor, not a filing cabinet.

Enter the integration-first mindset

This is precisely where the new crop of tools is heading. Rather than locking logic inside proprietary workflows, integration-first systems expose everything through APIs and event streams. Webhooks broadcast assessment events in real time; guard expressions decide when those events should fire; data transforms shape payloads for whatever downstream system needs to listen.

We hope that Fluvial exemplifies the direction of travel. It was built originally for complex RFP and vendor-risk processes, but its API-first architecture means it can now serve as a generalised assessment engine. Every feature in its interface is mirrored in the API, allowing developers to create questionnaires, transition workflows or generate documents programmatically. Conditional logic based on CEL expressions lets integrations fire only when certain scores or approvals occur, while webhook payloads can be transformed on the fly to suit external schemas.

To the consultant’s ear, that matters less for its technical neatness than for what it enables in practice: truly automated due diligence chains. A supplier finishes an assessment; a webhook updates the risk register; another triggers contract generation; the signed document lands automatically in the compliance archive. No swivel-chair integration, no human relay.

Beyond TPRM: towards unified assurance

The bigger story, though, is that this architecture is not limited to vendor risk. The same pattern applies to ESG disclosures, product safety attestations, internal control surveys — any process that gathers structured information, routes it for approval and turns it into reusable evidence. As assurance functions converge, clients will expect a single engine capable of supporting them all.

That puts consultants in an interesting position. Their expertise in risk frameworks and regulatory interpretation remains indispensable, but now it can be multiplied through automation rather than manual oversight. Platforms like Fluvial simply provide the connective tissue — a way to embed that expertise directly into clients’ operational systems.

Looking ahead

If the last two decades were about building TPRM as a standalone discipline, the next will be about dissolving the boundaries again — integrating risk thinking into the everyday machinery of procurement, finance and compliance. The technology is catching up with that ambition: open, event-driven and extensible rather than locked into fixed templates.

So the story comes full circle. Procurement hasn’t been replaced by TPRM; instead, both are being subsumed into something broader — an ecosystem of connected assurance. And the tools worth watching are those that understand that orchestration, not administration, is now the real game.