Third-Party Risk and Contracting Toolkit — Supplier Tiering, DPA and MSA Checklists, SLA Design, Exit Clauses

Description
A proportionate third-party risk system: decide how much diligence a supplier warrants before you run any, then run the right depth for that tier.

Most third-party risk programmes fail the same way. They apply deep diligence to everything, exhaust the team, and quietly stop. The tiering model solves that by scoring suppliers on data access, operational criticality, regulatory exposure and substitutability, and assigning a proportionate assessment path to each tier.
The contracting half covers the commercial read of an agreement before legal review: the MSA checklist, the three clauses that cost the most money, service levels designed with a measurement method rather than only a target, and the exit and transition terms that are negotiable at signature and unobtainable afterwards.
This is educational and commercial material, not legal advice. It exists so you can identify what matters commercially and ask better questions of your own legal adviser. Contract law and data protection obligations vary by jurisdiction.

Who it is for: procurement and risk managers asked to stand up third-party risk management without a dedicated team or a governance platform, and commercial managers who negotiate service contracts and want to read one properly before it reaches legal review. Everything runs in Excel and Word.

What it is not: it is not a substitute for legal drafting and it contains no jurisdiction-specific clause wording. The checklists tell you what to look for and why it matters commercially; your own adviser tells you how it must be written where you operate. If you already run a mature programme on a dedicated platform, the tiering logic may still be useful but the templates will duplicate what you have.