Fourth party risk management: see beyond your suppliers

Security teams have long struggled with seeing the whole picture when it comes to supply chain risk. While traditional tools capture third-party information, they fall short in a few different ways.

Today’s solutions tend to look like this:

• Send a form to a supplier, which can be in the form of a spreadsheet or a tool. This form will collect point-in-time data about your supplier’s risk profile.
• Data received is stored in a spreadsheet, which may or may not include who your suppliers are working with.
• Data is then displayed in a siloed, disjointed fashion, meaning the complex interdependencies between multiple businesses remain hidden.
• If an incident occurs, it’s incredibly difficult and time consuming to understand if, and how, your business is impacted.

This is because businesses aren’t static and don’t work in a linear fashion.

Client and supplier relationships are complex and ever-evolving, and you a need a real-time, comprehensive overview of your suppliers’ suppliers to identify and understand changing critical dependencies and concentration risks.
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What Is Fourth Party Risk Management?

Fourth Parties gives you visibility into your suppliers’ critical suppliers, plotted in our Network Visualisation tool for faster, deeper supply chain analysis.

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Here’s how it works:

• Supplier declaration: Suppliers can now add their own critical suppliers (name and website) directly to their profile, and share it with all their clients on Risk Ledger.
• Client visibility: Connected clients can see each supplier’s critical relationship within their active supply chain network.
• See the bigger picture: Clients can see all fourth parties even if they aren’t yet on Risk Ledger.
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How Fourth Party Risk Management Improves Supply Chain Visibility

This isn’t just another field in the form or a line in a spreadsheet. It’s a shift in how supply chain risk is surfaced, leading to faster insights and action.

• From point-in-time to live context. Supplier profiles now include their dependencies, providing more clarity down the supply chain. Changes to these dependencies are immediately reflected in your active supply chain network.

• From fragmented data to shared intelligence. Instead of chasing or losing spreadsheets across suppliers, Fourth Parties gives security teams one consistent, structured view of critical dependencies.

• From scattered signals to focused decisions. Your active supply chain network highlights hidden exposures, shared service providers, and concentration risks, allowing you to make data-driven, strategic decisions.

• From messy spreadsheets to a scalable solution. As your supply chain grows in complexity, a visual solution is the quickest way to gather supply chain insights to drive efficient, actionable decisions.
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The Bigger Picture

Fourth Parties is the answer to the growing complexities of supply chains and the inherent risks that come with it. It is designed to help busy teams understand who to work with, and how to work with them. By knowing your fourth parties you can uncover hidden dependencies and concentration risks, while enhancing incident response planning, and have all the information at hand to demonstrate comprehensive risk management to your board and stakeholders.

We recently saw it in action too. With Fourth Parties, a UK based water company found that one of their suppliers relied on a fourth party who was recently impacted by an incident. The team was able to get in touch with their supplier on the platform to understand the impact on the supplier and the extended impact on their own organisation.

By showing you who your suppliers depend on, you can pinpoint weak links and hidden dependencies, and start working with suppliers to improve supply chain security holistically.
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How to Start Using Fourth Party Risk Management

Fourth Parties is now live on the Risk Ledger Supply Chain Security Platform , ready for clients to explore. Suppliers can also review their pre-populated Critical Suppliers list in their Risk Ledger profiles.

If you're interested in learning more about Fourth Parties risk analysis and how it can reveal supply chain dependencies and concentration risk, get in touch with us today.