Treating every vendor with the same level of scrutiny does not make your Third Party Risk Management (TPRM) program more secure. It spreads your team thinner, and it leaves you without a clear answer when someone asks why a given vendor sits where it does.

In this live fireside chat, Josh Arteaga (UpGuard) and Donald Eckrod III (Schneider Downs) bring audit-side and platform experience together into a practical playbook for tiering vendors: defensible, scalable, and simple enough to apply the following Monday.

We'll cover how to:

• Set criticality standards up front, and know when to revisit them: agree the criteria once, delegate the tiering with confidence, and set a cadence (quarterly, yearly) for revisiting as the vendor list changes.
• Match assessment effort to risk: use tiers to decide how often, and how deeply, to reassess, so a proven long-term vendor is not over-scrutinized and a new one is not overlooked.
• Cut through alert noise: configure alerts and dashboards differently by tier, so your team sees what matters instead of wading through low-risk noise.

Attendees will leave with a risk-based tiering framework they can defend to an auditor and scale as the vendor list grows.