The pandemic highlighted the need for real-time intelligence on third parties. Our survey showed that more than half of organizations want to improve real-time information, risk metrics and reporting in the year ahead so they have a single, up-to-date picture of their third parties and the risk they may pose.

Digital risks arising from increasingly digitized ways of working are a top emerging concern in third-party risk management. This is followed by financial resilience of third parties, and the ability to manage diversity and inclusion, health and safety, the environment, and climate change.

Many organizations were unprepared when COVID-19 became a global pandemic. Ten months on, almost half of our survey respondents still felt they were in ‘respond’ mode – they were still reacting to the need for business continuity and resilience throughout their supply chain, customer relationships and digital capabilities. We expected more organizations to have learnt from their experiences and used them to start to inform their TPRM capability by then. The pandemic has disrupted the TPRM maturity journey for many but it has been a wake-up call for organizations to invest in the year ahead.

COVID-19 led many organizations to consider taking outsourced business activities back in-house because they had concerns about third-party failure or losing control of outsourced activity. This idea largely didn’t progress as organizations feel too much pressure to save costs or lack internal capability to deliver the activities.