Fluvial Market Positioning

Summary

  • Customers: Advisory firms and large organisations in regulated sectors conducting supplier assessments, due diligence, and compliance projects.

  • Market Gaps:

    1. Affordable tools are inflexible, customisable tools require expensive “Enterprise” implementation
    2. Assessment data is isolated and difficult to reuse for ongoing analysis

  • Our Approach:

    1. Visual workflow editing and flexible business rules allow non-technical users to customise the platform
    2. Integrated document automation connects assessment data with reference information

  • Why Us: We developed and deployed a pioneering vendor assessment system in 2005 which is still in use by the world’s largest banks and airlines.

Market Context

The supplier risk management and vendor assessment market is mature and crowded. Providers like Prevalent, ProcessUnity, and OneTrust focus heavily on cyber risk. Sales cycles are long, switching costs are high.

Consultancies, which coordinate multi-participant assessments across many clients, are limited by tools optimised for in-house risk or procurement teams.

Product Foundation

Fluvial is a new version of an assessment platform used by 28 of the 30 largest banks, major airlines, and global hotel chains. The previous system is proven for complex projects: regulated financial due diligence, safety-critical supplier management, and global procurement.

The previous platform was designed in 2005 and subsequently grew to 1.5 million lines of code over two decades, making changes increasingly expensive.

Fluvial reimplements the core functionality in 30,000 lines of modern, well-tested code—a 95% reduction whilst preserving the advanced questionnaire engine. The new architecture add new capabilities: flexible workflows, structured document automation, comprehensive integration capabilities.

Product Differentiation

Fluvial combines an assessment engine, graphical workflows, and document automation. This combination is rarely offered together and suits teams running complex assessments.

1. Assessment Engine

The questionnaire engine supports:

  • Multiple scoring sets allowing different stakeholders to evaluate from their own perspective (engineering, finance, legal)
  • Hierarchical weighting for nested sections enabling the Analytical Hierarchy Process methodology
  • Fine-grained permissions for multi-party collaboration

These requirements emerged from actual deployments at banks and airlines where many teams must reach consensus. Most supplier risk tools were built for cyber-only workflows; Fluvial’s origins in complex procurement give it wider applicability.

2. Workflows Beyond Procurement

The rewrite cleanly separates workflow from questionnaires. The old product hard-coded procurement steps; Fluvial designs workflows through a graphical UI and simple policies.

This makes Fluvial a general assessment platform not just a procurement tool. It now supports legal due diligence, regulatory compliance, vendor risk, and internal audits — any process that gathers structured information.

3. Document Automation

What happens to assessment data after collection? In practice, responses feed contracts, reference databases, compliance reports, and vendor profiles. Current providers export data; Fluvial provides persistent mappings and bidirectional generation. A questionnaire response can update data in a document, or a questionnaire can be automatically generated from a document structure.

4. Integration Architecture

Fluvial provides full integration APIs, includes configurable webhooks, and incorporates an AI friendly automation interface. Consultancies can connect their existing toolsets using open standards and keep automations portable across clients. Established providers often treat integration as services revenue; in Fluvial it is the core of the product.

Market Opportunity

Primary: Advisory and Consulting Firms

The architecture fits advisory firms running assessments and diligence for clients. They need:

  • Multi-client data isolation
  • Proprietary reference databases built from client work
  • Per-client workflows
  • White-label deliverables

Current providers sell to end-users. Some consultancies develop in-house tools, but these can be difficult to maintain and upgrade as the market evolves. Others adapt their processes to different tools, project-by-project, maintaing a set of internal templates in spreadsheets. These approaches distract consultancies from their core-competency, which is selling their sector expertise to clients.

Secondary: Enterprises with Complex Requirements

Large organisations running many assessment types (vendor risk, compliance, diligence, audits) often deploy several tools. Fluvial consolidates these into one system, reducing software fees and training costs. Enterprises typically come through partner consulting engagements.

Policies and workflows let teams define their own approval rules without custom development or services.

Competitive Dynamics

Advantages

Underserved Segment - Consultancies are poorly serviced by existing, risk-first providers.

Technical Differentiation - document automation, flexible policies, and comprehensive integration architecture are difficult to replicate without major development.

Partner Benefits - Trusted consultants bring domain expertise and relationships, reducing sales cost and shortening discovery.

Lower Services Dependency - Teams can handle integrations and workflows themselves, reducing costs; partners provide sector-specific services where needed.

Challenges

Brand - Fluvial must communicate the benefits of integrated data and automation.

Sales - Selling flexibility & customisation requires deeper discovery than standard feature checklist sales.

Ecosystem - Partnerships with security ratings, document systems, and enterprise software help prove value.

Channel Dependency - Near-term growth depends on partner pipeline and alignment.

Business Model Considerations

Revenue Model

Subscription-based with tiering based on:

  • Number of projects/assessments
  • Document volume (number of reference documents)
  • Integration usage for integration-heavy deployments

Partner structure:

  • Per-partner accounts with per-client projects
  • Partner tiers and revenue share for reselling
  • Optional template/library marketplace