For Advisory
Advisory firms that run vendor checks, due diligence, or compliance reviews face the same problem: every client needs different questionnaires, workflows, and reports. Building these from scratch wastes time. Generic platforms assume you’re buying for yourself, not working for clients.
Fluvial supports how advisory firms actually work—from first assessment to building knowledge over time.
The Advisory Process
1. Design Assessment Framework
Task: Build the questionnaire that matches your method and client needs—whether vendor security, M&A due diligence, compliance, or procurement.
Current Challenge: Starting from scratch wastes time. Copying last year’s Word document loses improvements. Survey tools can’t handle nested structures or teams working together. Spreadsheets break.
How Fluvial Helps:
Template Libraries - Build reusable modules (cyber security, financial controls, operational risk) that you combine for each job. Your method becomes an asset, not something you rebuild every time.
Nested Structure - Organise questions exactly as you need: sections within sections. Nest as deeply as your method requires.
Reuse Sections - Import proven questions from past work. Change them for each client while keeping your core approach.
Team Collaboration - Team members see sections based on their expertise. Legal staff handle compliance, technical analysts cover security, you oversee everything.
Example: A financial advisory firm keeps a library covering cyber, compliance, finance, and operations. For each new client, they pick the right modules, adjust for the client’s risk appetite, and deploy in hours.
2. Deploy and Collect Responses
Task: Send questionnaires to target companies, vendors, or internal teams. Track responses, handle follow-up questions, coordinate across multiple people.
Current Challenge: Tracking who’s answered what needs manual work. Email attachments get out of sync. People overwrite each other’s work. You can’t see progress without asking.
How Fluvial Helps:
Response Workflow - Questions move through states (not answered, answered, under review, rejected, approved) so everyone knows what needs attention.
Access Control - Target companies see only their questionnaire. Client staff see summary progress. Your team controls everything. Each client’s data is isolated.
Assignment - Allocate sections to specific people. Senior staff approve junior responses before submission. Experts validate technical answers.
Real-Time Progress - See completion status, find bottlenecks, send targeted reminders. No more “can you send me an update” emails.
Example: A vendor assessment where the target’s security team handles technical questions, their legal team covers compliance, and their finance director handles commercial terms—all working at the same time in their sections, with the vendor’s CEO reviewing before final submission.
3. Integrate Additional Data
Task: Add external data to questionnaire responses—cyber ratings from BitSight or SecurityScorecard, financial records, compliance databases, past assessment history.
Current Challenge: Manual data entry from multiple sources. Copy-paste errors. Information goes stale. No systematic way to add third-party intelligence.
How Fluvial Helps:
API Integration - Connect to cyber rating providers, regulatory databases, CRM systems. Pull relevant data automatically when assessing a vendor or target company.
Structured Data - External data sits alongside questionnaire responses in one unified structure, not scattered across spreadsheets and documents.
Historical Reference - When assessing a vendor you’ve seen before, past data is available immediately. Compare current responses against past assessments.
Webhook Automation - Set your own systems to push data to Fluvial when relevant events occur (new cyber rating published, regulatory status changes).
Example: A consultancy keeps vendor profiles that combine questionnaire responses, cyber ratings, financial filings, and past scores. When Client B asks about a vendor previously assessed for Client A, they have comprehensive intelligence immediately.
4. Analyse and Score
Task: Evaluate responses using your method. Different people score from different angles—technical teams assess capability, finance evaluates cost structure, legal reviews compliance.
Current Challenge: Excel scoring sheets break when questionnaires change. Manual calculation causes errors. Different people use inconsistent criteria. Explaining your method to clients means rebuilding scoring logic in PowerPoint.
How Fluvial Helps:
Multiple Scoring Views - Define different scoring sets for the same questionnaire. Technical analysts score for capability, financial analysts score for cost risk, legal scores for compliance—each using appropriate weighting.
Nested Weighting - Sections and subsections carry independent weights that compound through the structure. Change one section’s emphasis without recalculating everything manually.
Automated Calculations - Multiple-choice responses auto-score. Adjust weightings and scores recalculate instantly. No spreadsheet maintenance.
Qualitative Analysis - Record expert judgements alongside scores. Capture reasoning for audit trails and client reporting.
Example: An M&A due diligence where the technical team weights security and scalability highly, the legal team emphasises regulatory compliance, and the financial team prioritises cost predictability—all evaluating the same target company questionnaire, each producing their domain-specific risk score.
5. Generate Client Deliverables
Task: Turn assessment data into client reports, vendor profiles, compliance documents, or rating summaries. Match client branding and formatting requirements.
Current Challenge: Copy data from questionnaires into Word templates. Update PowerPoint decks manually. Errors creep in during copying. When source data changes, documents go out of sync.
How Fluvial Helps:
Persistent Mappings - Define once how questionnaire responses fill document sections. Reuse these mappings across jobs.
Automatic Generation - Documents update when underlying data changes. Add a new assessment response, the vendor profile updates automatically.
Client-Specific Templates - Set formatting, branding, and structure per client. Generate the same intelligence in different presentation styles.
Format Flexibility - Output as PDF for distribution, JSON for system integration, HTML for web display.
Example: A vendor security assessment where responses automatically fill both a client-facing risk report and an internal vendor profile that feeds the firm’s reference database. Update the assessment data, both documents reflect changes immediately.
6. Build Institutional Intelligence
Task: Build knowledge across client work. After assessing 50 vendors, that intelligence should be a firm asset—informing future work, enabling comparative analysis, speeding up new client projects.
Current Challenge: Each project ends with archived PDFs. Intelligence doesn’t build up. Junior staff can’t access past assessments. You assess the same vendor twice using different criteria because knowledge isn’t organised.
How Fluvial Helps:
Persistent Reference Documents - Vendor profiles, target company assessments, and compliance records exist as structured data, not locked in PDFs.
Cross-Project Intelligence - Compare vendor performance across clients (without breaking data isolation). Spot trends in vendor capabilities. Analyse risk patterns across your portfolio.
Audit Trails - Complete history of what changed, when, and why. Regulatory requirements met. Client questions answered with defensible documentation.
Knowledge Compounding - New clients benefit from built-up intelligence. Assessment time decreases while quality increases. Your database becomes competitive advantage.
Example: After three years running vendor security assessments, a consultancy has evaluated 200 technology vendors. When a new client asks about 10 vendors, 6 are already in the database with comprehensive historical assessments. The work starts 60% complete.
Why This Matters for Advisory Firms
Most assessment platforms assume you’re evaluating vendors for your own organisation. They can’t handle:
- Multi-client data isolation - Client A’s data stays separate from Client B’s, yet you operate one deployment with shared templates and cross-client analytics
- Per-client customisation - Each job can have distinct workflows, approval processes, and deliverables without rebuilding infrastructure
- Knowledge accumulation - Intelligence builds across jobs rather than being archived per project
- White-label delivery - Client-facing materials show your brand, not the platform vendor’s
Fluvial was designed to support consultantancies that act on behalf of various clients so the permission structure is designed to allow flexible project access control.
Flexibility Without Professional Services
Client requirements vary. Client A needs legal review before any vendor approval. Client B requires technical committee sign-off above certain risk thresholds. Client C wants automatic escalation if responses aren’t received within 10 days.
Most platforms need paid professional services to implement these variations. Fluvial uses readable business rules you write and change yourself:
// Client A: Legal approval required
transition.to == 'approved' && approvals.legal.count >= 1
// Client B: Committee for high risk
risk_score > 75 && approvals.any(role == 'technical_committee')
// Client C: Escalation timing
days_since(request_sent) > 10 && status == 'pending'You control the logic. Your team writes the rules, with AI asssistance. No waiting for vendor customisation.
Practical Deployment Scenarios
Multi-Client Vendor Assessment Practice
You run vendor security assessments for financial services clients. Each client has different risk frameworks, approval requirements, and reporting formats.
Implementation:
- Define vendor assessment questionnaire template based on your method
- Create client-specific projects with customised workflows
- Set document mappings to fill client-specific report templates
- Build firm-wide vendor profile database capturing assessment results
Result:
- New client onboarding takes hours, not weeks rebuilding from scratch
- Vendor intelligence builds—when Client C asks about a vendor assessed for Client A, you have historical data
- Junior analysts follow defined workflows; senior partners approve high-risk findings
- Client deliverables stay consistent while reflecting client-specific requirements
M&A Due Diligence Service Line
You run due diligence across legal, financial, operational, and technical domains for private equity clients.
Implementation:
- Create questionnaire templates by domain (legal, financial, technical)
- Set multi-stage workflows: data gathering → expert analysis → partner review → client presentation
- Use nested permissions so specialists see relevant sections only
- Map findings to deliverable templates (investment memo, management presentation, data room summaries)
- Build target company database tracking assessments across deals
Result:
- Deals move faster—questionnaires deploy in hours, not days reformatting documents
- Quality improves—structured assessment ensures complete coverage
- Knowledge persists—insights from past deals inform future assessments
- Audit trails demonstrate diligence rigour for client confidence
Regulatory Compliance Advisory
You help financial institutions prepare for regulatory examinations by running mock assessments using regulatory frameworks.
Implementation:
- Build questionnaire libraries based on regulatory requirements (Basel III, GDPR, SOC 2)
- Set approval workflows matching client governance structures
- Generate compliance reports in regulatory submission formats
- Keep complete audit trails for examination documentation
- Track remediation of identified gaps through document automation
Result:
- Repeatable method across clients facing similar regulations
- Rapid deployment when new regulations emerge (change templates, don’t rebuild)
- Defensible documentation showing systematic compliance verification
- Reference database demonstrating compliance patterns and best practices
… a Survey Tool - Consumer platforms can’t handle professional assessments: weighted scoring, multi-party workflows, audit trails, fine-grained access control.
… a Generic TPRM Platform - Corporate vendor risk platforms assume you’re buying for internal use, not delivering services to clients. They can’t isolate client data or support white-label deployment.
… a Custom Development Project - You’re not hiring developers to build assessment infrastructure. You’re setting up a platform that already handles the complexity.
… Locked to One Use Case - The same platform serves vendor assessment, due diligence, compliance, procurement—any structured assessment process your firm runs.
Technical Foundation
The questionnaire engine was proven over 20 years at 28 of the 30 largest banks, major airlines, and hotel chains. Fluvial is a complete rebuild with modern architecture:
- API-first design (OpenAPI 3.1 specifications)
- Industry-standard technologies (JSON Schema, CEL policies)
- Cloud-native deployment
- Self-service setup
Fluvial runs as Docker containers that you can host on your own infrastructure or access via our cloud service. Advisory firms working with sensitive client data choose on-premises deployment for complete control over data location and security policies.
Learn more about deployment options →
Integration With Your Ecosystem
Advisory firms operate with client CRM systems, document repositories, project management tools, and billing platforms. Fluvial provides:
- Complete API coverage - Every UI capability accessible via REST APIs
- Webhook events - Real-time notifications when assessments complete or approvals occur, with guard expressions controlling when webhooks fire and transforms shaping payloads for receiving systems
- White-label capabilities - Client-facing materials present your brand
- Self-service integration - Your technical team implements connections as needed
We don’t see integration as a consulting fees cash-cow—it’s a built-in capability accessible to non-technical users.
Learn more about integration architecture →
Getting Started
For firms evaluating assessment infrastructure:
- Technical Review - Deploy a pilot project with real data to validate capabilities
- Workflow Design - Map one client’s approval process to test flexibility
- Integration Testing - Connect to one existing system to verify API capabilities
- Economics Analysis - Compare platform cost against current manual processes
We provide infrastructure that matches how advisory firms actually operate. The platform reflects decades of enterprise deployment experience, now available with the flexibility consultancies require.
Fluvial serves firms that run complex assessments for clients and need infrastructure that matches their sophistication without imposing rigid workflows or creating client data management problems.