Customer story
How a two-person TPRM team scaled an embedded banking platform serving 30+ fintechs — without adding headcount.
83%
Reduction in time to onboard new vendors
90%
Faster completion of risk assessments
$92k+
Saved annually
Executive summary
Thread Bank is a fast-growing embedded banking platform serving over 30 fintech companies (and growing) nationwide, all done with an intentionally lean team. With this growth came added complexity and volume of risk. The bank’s two-person Third Party Risk Management (TPRM) team was grappling with decentralized tools and processes, leading to 60-day SLAs for vendor onboarding and reactive risk assessments requiring 10 days per vendor.
After implementing Coverbase, Thread Bank’s TPRM team was relieved of massive administrative burdens, allowing Thread Bank to reduce its risk assessments to 1-2 days, vendors could be onboarded in 10 days, all enabling real-time proactivity and defense. Thread Bank can now compliantly and securely expand exponentially, without the need for additional headcount.
The challenge
60-Day SLAs and No Way to Be Proactive
Thread Bank is an FDIC-insured embedded banking institution headquartered in Tennessee that transformed into a sponsor banking model in 2022. With the new model, the bank scaled rapidly from five banking relationships to over 30 banks in just four years, all while maintaining its legacy banking network.
Thread Bank runs lean by design with under 120 employees. The TPRM department that handles assessing, onboarding, monitoring, and reporting on every third-party vendor relationship the bank carries consists of just two people.
As the bank accelerated its embedded banking ventures, the volume and complexity of TPRM work scaled with it. Coupled with the archaic and decentralized processes, this created an inability to become proactive, and lengthy SLAs despite the pressure to keep up with the rapid expansion.
Archaic and Decentralized Processes with Difficult Audit Trails
Vendor documents lived across SharePoint folders, email inboxes, and individual hard drives. Assessments were done in Excel, and reporting was a manual effort. This all led to massive amounts of administrative work.
"From a user perspective, it was really hard to navigate and really hard to update. There were vendor records all over the place and nothing was really streamlined, so there was no real way to connect the dots either. The reporting was almost impossible to create, too"
Elizabeth Blosh-Myers · Director of TPRM, Thread Bank
Low Capacity for Proactive Risk Management
Banking is one of the most strictly regulated industries, with extremely high risk implications. The team worked under immense pressure to remain compliant at all times. Each risk assessment required 7-10 days per vendor.
"We didn't have any tools we could leverage to be proactive."
Elizabeth Blosh-Myers · Director of TPRM, Thread Bank
Lengthy SLAs, but Pressure to Move Faster
The unspoken expectation was to move as fast as possible. In practice, this journey to onboard a new vendor, from first contact to contract signature, usually stretched 60 days (more than double the target).
The solution
A System of Record That Meets Them Where They Are
The team needed a solution that would meet them where they were: decentralized, very lean, and moving fast in a highly regulated environment. They also needed a team that took their unique complexities into consideration when finding solutions.
What set Coverbase apart was not just the advanced capability, but the offering of genuine partnership.
"I've been completely impressed on how willing Coverbase has been to partner with us, taking our concerns or pain points and making them into a yes. You don't always see that with other partners."
Janelle Gamble · SVP Enterprise Risk Management, Thread Bank
Coverbase was able to immediately offer: a centralized, collaborative system of record, AI-driven risk analyses that offer continuous vendor monitoring alongside regulatory-ready reporting, and significantly faster SLAs across the board thanks to the reduction of administrative burdens.
Centralized, Collaborative System of Record
Thread Bank now has one place for all its TPRM needs: vendor records, documentation, risk ratings, audit trails, and reporting. Moreover, the system is intuitive and collaborative. The institutional knowledge that previously lived with one person now lives in a platform everyone can access, track, and audit. "For us, it's a one-stop shop. We don't have to do things outside of the system. We can contact the vendors within the system and have that recorded. We can flag our internal Subject Matter Experts to approve if needed. All the issues remediation can be tracked within one space" Elizabeth Blosh-Myers · Director of TPRM, Thread Bank
AI-Driven Risk Analysis, Monitoring, and Reporting
Coverbase ingests all vendor documentation and automatically surfaces risk-relevant data points, flags control gaps, summarizes weaknesses, and calculates inherent risk in a fraction of the time manual reviews required. It also pulls security posture data on an ongoing basis for every vendor in Thread Bank’s portfolio. When it comes to reporting, Coverbase actively generates clear, executive summaries that document all controls assessed, document reviews, and the explicit logic behind each residual risk rating.
Faster SLAs with the Reduction of Administrative Burdens
Coverbase initiates vendor assessments with minimal information and provides an instant signal on whether the vendor partnership is viable. This automatically eliminates the biggest bottleneck in the prior process. Most importantly, the maturity of this process has now allowed the TRPM team to aim for ~10 day risk assessments and formalize vendor onboarding in just 30 days! "The vendor does not need to provide us a line of business nor documentation for Coverbase to be able to provide identified risks, such as financial information, their security posture, and their OFAC sanctions. This then signals to us an immediate ‘GO’ or ‘NO GO.'" Elizabeth Blosh-Myers · Director of TPRM, Thread Bank With this administrative burden lifted, the team can now continue to be lean and proactive.
“It used to take us 45-60 days to onboard a new vendor, easily. We were narrowly focused on bringing this onboarding timeline down to as little as 10 days, and that’s only possible with Coverbase”
Results & Impact
The Same Team. A Completely Different Operation.
The impact of Coverbase at Thread Bank was immediate and measurable. Within weeks of implementation, the TPRM team had fundamentally changed how it operates without adding headcount, changing its staffing model, or sacrificing diligence quality.
83% reduction in vendor onboarding time: Onboarding of embedded banking partners has dropped from 60 days to approximately 10 days, offering over 80% reduction in time.
90% faster completion of risk assessments: What took an average of 6-10 working days now takes 1-2 days per assessment with Coverbase, representing a 75-90% reduction in time per review.
Scaled capacity without scaling headcount: Coverbase’s AI absorbs the administrative burden, freeing the team to focus on risk judgement and strategic advisory. The reductions in onboarding time and increased speed in SLAs continues to be done by the lean but mighty two-person team, without the need for additional headcount, saving over $92,000+ USD a year.
Trusted adoption of AI: Thread Bank has a board-level mandate to embed AI across all operations. Coverbase has proven the power of AI, curbing any AI skepticism, and converting it into enthusiasm for automation.
Onboarding time
60d
→10d
From first contact to contract signature
Risk assessment
10d
→1–2d
Per vendor, without sacrificing quality
Headcount added
0
Team stayed at 2 people throughout scale
Board mandate
AI skepticism converted to org-wide\nenthusiasm
