The vendor questions that stall a payments partnership
A fintech carries two security burdens at once. You are assessed hard by banks, PSPs and regulators, and you are accountable for a supplier chain that is mostly other people's APIs. Both get harder as you grow.
What makes fintech different
- You are assessed constantly. Every bank partner, card scheme and PSP runs its own due diligence, on its own template, on its own schedule.
- Your suppliers are your product. KYC, payments, ledger, fraud scoring. An outage or a control failure at a provider is your incident, and your customers will not distinguish.
- DORA applies or will. Directly if you are EU regulated, indirectly through contracts if you serve EU financial entities. See the DORA page.
- The FCA expects operational resilience. Important business services, impact tolerances, and evidence that you understand the third parties supporting them.
- Concentration risk is real for you. Several providers sitting on the same upstream infrastructure is a resilience fact, not a procurement detail.
Where it usually goes wrong
The pattern we see most. Due diligence is thorough at onboarding because a partner demanded it. Nothing re-checks afterwards. Eighteen months later a bank partner asks for current evidence on a critical provider and the most recent thing on file is the onboarding questionnaire. The deal does not die, but it slows by weeks.
What we do
- Answer the assessments once
- A maintained evidence pack, so a partner's questionnaire is a copy exercise rather than a fortnight of chasing colleagues.
- Keep the register current
- Criticality, data locations, attestation status and subcontractors per provider, re-checked continuously rather than annually.
- Catch regressions
- A provider relaxing mail authentication or letting a certificate lapse is visible publicly. You hear about it when it happens.
- Map to DORA and FCA
- Findings carry the article or control they relate to, so evidence goes into a regulator-facing pack without translation.
- Board reporting
- One page a board or an investment committee will read, not a spreadsheet export.
Start with a number
Run the free vendor check against three of your critical providers. If any of them cannot get DMARC right, that is a reasonable prompt to ask what else has drifted.
Partner due diligence slowing you down?
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