Startup Emerges From Stealth Against Risky Bank Suppliers

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Supplier relationships can be strategic for a company, but they can also expose a corporation to risk. One startup has just emerged from stealth mode in an effort to mitigate that risk.

RiskRecon is now in operation with $3 million in venture capital, reports by Forbes said on Friday (April 8). The company focuses on mitigating supplier and vendor risk for financial institutions by assessing how secure those suppliers and vendors operate online.

Traditionally, banks assess third-party vendor risk simply be sending out an email, or even an Excel spreadsheet, to all its partners. Vendors fill out a survey themselves, and bank IT departments assess the responses to see how exposed the financial institution is based on those vendor answers.

RiskRecon automates this process, reports said.

“We are almost like an efficient search engine for vendors,” said the company’s owner, Kelly White, in an interview with the publication. “We can measure the security of an enterprise just by looking at how they present themselves.”

The seed funding for RiskRecon was led by General Catalyst, reports said, and while the round closed late last year, it was only just announced last week.

White’s background is in software development, and he formerly served as chief information security officer at Zions Bancorporation. RiskRecon said it already has several Fortune 500 businesses as clients, though did not specify who.

White added that the company’s goal is to strengthen security for businesses across verticals, especially with the rise of online operations.

“We will be bringing transparency to a company’s security performance,” he told Forbes. “We think this will have a big effect on the quality of Internet security at a large scale.”