Customer Value Story:
Ready, Willing & Able

The pandemic has disrupted operating models of businesses across the globe. Since the beginning, LogicManager has partnered with our clients to help them pivot and prepare. As we wrote about in our blog, our company was built on a foundation of seeing around the corner. In February, we rolled out a COVID-19 relief package to our customers. In May, we rolled out a Return to Work and Preparing for Wave 2 Solution package.

Over that critical period of time, we collected over 160 value stories from our customers about how they leveraged our guidance to drive their businesses forward. This series will delve deeper into those stories in hopes of helping other businesses throughout this challenging time.

Topic: Evaluating vendor readiness to drive successful business performance.

Company Profile

For over 120 years, a New England-based bank has been striving to be a force for positive change. Their team spans across 30 locations and works every day to hold one another accountable, change for the better and evolve with the future.

This bank offers a wide range of financial services, from loan offerings, to insurance plans, to wealth management and more. They offer a variety of these services remotely, and historically relied on technology to provide online banking portals, person-to-person transfers, mobile deposits and more.

Challenge

In March of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic began to unfold, New England quickly became a hotspot. Businesses everywhere closed their brick-and-mortar operations and transitioned to remote service.

The operational disruption and economic strain brought on by the pandemic forced many organizations, especially banks and those offering financial services, to adapt. To keep up with an influx of small business loan applications, other areas of banking operations needed to be made more efficient – without sacrificing quality of service. Simultaneously, the transition to a remote environment called for banks to put their trust in the hands of their third party vendors more than ever before, as their direct relationships with their customers suddenly became hinged on technology.

Of course, change is never easy. Our client needed to quickly determine whether or not everyone was prepared to pull their weight during this critical transition. There was a need to improve efficiencies across the board, but the most notable shift would be their increased reliance on virtual services.

It’s important to consistently reassess goals and key risk indicators by evaluating the readiness of your organization – especially ones associated with your third parties, and especially during times of transition. This client realized that in order to sustain their business operations throughout the economic disruption (and ultimately emerge triumphant in a remote environment) they needed to take a deep dive into their vendor partnerships.

Solution

As the pandemic began to rapidly unfold this spring, we reached out to all of our clients to extend LogicManager’s Pandemic Package solutions. This bank responded immediately, asking for more information. While they had been a LogicManager client for many years, we began working with them more closely than ever to overcome this significant challenge.

Our client discussed their options with their Advisory Analyst. Given the fact that they would now be offering the majority of their services virtually, they wanted to ensure that the third party software programs enabling those virtual services were prepared to protect their customers’ sensitive information. On top of that, with no end to the virus in sight, they needed to evaluate those vendors’ core capabilities to ensure the potential for a long-term partnership.

Together, our client and their LogicManager Analyst determined that the Vendor COVID-19 Readiness Questionnaire and Vendor Incident Form were the best fit for their organization’s needs. Once our client receives the responses from the form and questionnaire, they gain important insight into:

• The vendor’s most critical risks (e.g. “What security threats do you take most seriously?”)
• The controls that are in place to mitigate those risks (e.g. “What cybersecurity policies do you employ?”)
• Their disaster recovery and business continuity plans (e.g. “What is your readiness strategy in the event of a human-made or natural emergency?”)
• Critical compliance efforts (e.g. “What is your ability to demonstrate a history of compliance?”)

In just a couple of weeks, the questionnaire and form were implemented into the client’s system and ready to be distributed and completed.

Business Outcome

These solutions ladder up to support our client’s core business values of accountability, consistent improvement and innovation.

The readiness questionnaire and incident form proactively work together to help this bank gain insight into how their most critical vendors are responding to the pandemic. They also inform them of the most important issues their vendors face, which provides helpful context when looking to identify the root cause of any issue. By allowing them to re-evalutate their relationships, these tools in turn help our client re-evalutate their enterprise-wide business needs.

Let’s evaluate the positive business outcomes as a result of implementing these new processes:

• Vendor failure can directly impact the customer experience, which can trigger a domino effect ultimately influencing your reputation. This client is primed and positioned to spot a potential issue with a vendor before it occurs, eliminating reputational risk.
• With a robust and reliable software powering this client’s vendor due diligence efforts, it eliminates the need to spend money on external consultants.
• By nature of their business, this customer must protect extremely sensitive client information and the consequences of a data breach are far too dire. Vetting all of their vendors, and consistently doing so, ensures that their vendors’ security measures are up to their own standards.
• Automating work is key to ensuring productivity if people do fall ill. Ensuring that all of their employees are able to continue to work seamlessly should they move to a 100% remote environment prevents chaos and promises business continuity.
• LogicManager’s software has best practices built into it, so this client is off on the right foot and poised to avoid negligence in the long run.

As a business leader during these critical times, there is nothing more important than gaining insight into the most critical areas of your business – especially the other businesses that you interact most closely with.

With so much uncertainty looming over our everyday lives, taking a risk-based approach when managing your business is a nonnegotiable. With LogicManager as their partner, this company can stay on top of and ahead of risk in today’s ever-changing landscape.