How Thread Bank cut vendor onboarding from 60 days to 10

Thread Bank runs lean by design. Its third-party risk team consists of two people, supporting an embedded banking platform that serves more than 30 fintech companies.

As the business grew, the workload grew with it. Vendor records were scattered across SharePoint, email, and individual hard drives. Assessments lived in Excel, while reporting required another round of manual work.

With Coverbase, the team cut vendor onboarding from 60 days to 10, an 83% reduction, with no additional headcount.

A growing business, a fragmented process

Thread Bank's move into a sponsor banking model in 2022 brought more relationships and greater complexity. The bank grew from five banking relationships to more than 30 in four years. The risk team needed to keep pace while maintaining diligence in a highly regulated environment.

The earlier workflow made that difficult. Documentation was hard to locate and update, institutional knowledge was fragmented, and reporting was difficult to assemble. Each risk assessment required 10 days per vendor.

Elizabeth Blosh-Myers, Director of TPRM, described the earlier setup:

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

The team was under pressure to move faster, but had little capacity to become more proactive. In Blosh-Myers's words: “We didn't have any tools we could leverage to be proactive.” Onboarding a new vendor, from first contact to contract signature, usually stretched to 60 days, more than double the target.

Put the whole relationship in one place

Coverbase gave Thread Bank a shared system of record for vendor information, documents, risk ratings, audit trails, and reporting.

The team can contact vendors within the platform, record those conversations, involve internal subject-matter experts in approvals, and track issue remediation in the same place.

As Blosh-Myers put it:

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

That also changes where knowledge lives. Information that once depended on a single person's files can be accessed, followed, and audited by others.

Make the review easier to act on

Coverbase reads vendor documentation and surfaces risk-relevant information, control gaps, and weaknesses. It also supports ongoing security-posture monitoring across the vendor portfolio.

Executive summaries document the controls assessed, the documents reviewed, and the reasoning behind residual-risk ratings. The team has less administrative work to reconstruct before it can explain a decision.

Initial research into financial information, security posture, and sanctions can provide an early signal about a potential relationship, even before a vendor supplies its full documentation.

Blosh-Myers explained how that early signal works:

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.'

The same two people, more capacity

Within weeks of implementation, the team had changed how it operates. Onboarding fell from 60 days to 10, an 83% reduction. Risk assessments are 90% faster, taking one to two days instead of 10. The two-person team did it without adding headcount and saved more than $92,000 a year.

Those outcomes gave the team more capacity for risk judgment and advice. The aim was to maintain diligence with a lean team, not to remove people from consequential decisions.

Thread Bank has a board-level mandate to embed AI across all operations. Coverbase helped curb AI skepticism across the bank and convert it into enthusiasm for automation.