"We will never do an assessment outside of Coverbase again"
That’s how Chris Morgan, CISO at Coastal Bank, describes his third-party risk program after a year with Coverbase. Every assessment, finding, and piece of supporting evidence lives in one system. Two decades of vendor management history, once scattered across spreadsheets and a legacy GRC tool, has been reconciled and loaded in as the authoritative source.
The problem AI adoption usually runs into
Coastal Bank’s prior system was, in Morgan’s words, built for a different era: manual, spreadsheet-heavy, and unable to keep up with a growing vendor population. He evaluated the market, including the bank’s legacy GRC platform and a couple of newer entrants, one of which looked more like a ratings and scorecard tool than a true third-party risk system. None addressed the real bottleneck: too much time went to logistics and documentation, not analysis.
The moment that mattered:
A live regulatory exam
In March 2026, Coastal Bank went through a regulatory exam covering third-party risk management. Morgan knew what examiners would push on: the non-deterministic nature of AI. Would they trust that a control marked "satisfied" actually was, or assume the system was fabricating results?
Coverbase’s control-by-control interface was built for that scrutiny. For every control, examiners could see the AI’s analysis and the underlying evidence side by side, down to a screenshot of the exact language in the vendor’s SOC 2 report. Nothing was a black box.
The exam validated what Morgan had been building since Coastal Bank’s first assessment in Coverbase the previous September: AI that accelerates analysis without ever making the decision. On a typical assessment against roughly 200 controls, the majority clear cleanly in about 30 minutes, freeing his team to focus on the controls, or vendor circumstances, that actually carry risk.
From one team
to a program
Coastal didn’t stop at Morgan’s team. A separate group, the bank’s partner audit and controls function, has since stood up its own Coverbase instance to accelerate the recurring compliance audits it requires from fintech partners, previously done entirely by hand for a growing roster of partners. The team built custom control sets on the same framework Morgan’s team already relied on, with no structural changes required.
Risk findings
that reach procurement
The tighter connection between assessment and evidence has changed what Coastal Bank’s risk team can accomplish before a vendor relationship is finalized. With less time on logistics, Morgan’s team has caught and acted on issues earlier, during procurement, rather than after a contract is signed. In one instance, a finding surfaced during assessment was written directly into a vendor’s contract as a remediation deadline, an outcome Morgan says wouldn’t have been realistic when the team’s time went almost entirely to running the assessment rather than acting on it.
What’s next
Coastal is continuing to build out workflow and procurement integrations to connect findings to downstream action. For Morgan, the bigger picture is a program that used to be disconnected tools and manual processes, now operating as a single, auditable system his team, his regulators, and other teams across the bank can rely on.
