Carolina Alliance Bank Enhances Compliance Posture with Safe Systems’ Vendor Management Solution

Vendor management has taken on an increased level of importance as regulators are now more heavily scrutinizing how banks manage their third-party vendors. In response, many community banks and credit unions are looking for more efficient, effective ways to monitor their outsourced vendors, protect themselves from associated risks, and maintain overall compliance.

For South Carolina-based Carolina Alliance Bank, manually monitoring vendors through a spreadsheet simply became too time-consuming and cumbersome a task for its staff. The bank sought a proven solution that could help streamline vendor management processes and enable them to more efficiently manage contracts, renewals and other critical activities. As a long-time customer of Safe Systems, the bank determined that implementing this industry-specific, automated vendor management solution was the most cost-efficient method to control and manage the risks associated with its third-party providers.

Improved Compliance and Streamlined Processes

Using the manual spreadsheet method, it was sometimes difficult for the bank’s staff to provide the level of vendor reporting that regulators required. In contrast, Safe Systems’ Vendor Management solution enabled Carolina Alliance Bank to more easily provide the proper documentation to examiners and in doing so, clearly demonstrate that bank staff are properly reviewing and monitoring vendors on an on-going basis.

Furthermore, the bank is now able to centralize all documents in one location where staff and management can easily access them to provide detailed information for audit purposes and executive summaries for board review. Through this level of intelligent automation, paired with Safe Systems’ compliance support, the bank has significantly reduced the amount of time spent on vendor management processes, which has freed up resources to focus on additional revenue-generating activities for the bank.

“Since we switched over from a manual to automated process, we’ve received nothing but great feedback from regulators,” said Judy Price, Vice President at Carolina Alliance Bank. “Working with Safe Systems has enhanced our ability to meet regulatory requirements and provide ‘top of the line’ technology to our staff and customers. They are truly a valued extension of our team.”

For more information, download our vendor management case study, “Carolina Alliance Bank Improves Vendor Management Process.”