Knowing Your Outsourcer Just as Important as Knowing Your Customers

Banks have always tried to find the best ways to deal with their third party relationships. With the economy the way it is, outsourcing to service providers will likely increase as financial institutions realize just how much they can save by doing so.Of course, compliance and security are the two biggest keys in any productive bank/service bureau relationship. To that end, Symantec's David Krauss, a senior manager with the company's America's financial services practice, outlines in a blog some of the basics tenets banks must keep in mind when outsourcing any kind of functions to a third party. According to Krauss, there are five keys to doing outsourcing the right way. Knowing exactly whom you're dealing with is a natural, but he also reminds banks that they should have their own affairs in order as well.

Creating an outsourcing environment that's just right involves a lot of due diligence on the part of the bank. I wrote last August about vendor management issues and the most important take-away was that banks need to treat their service providers as extensions of their own organizations. They must be held to the same standards of security and compliance as the banks themselves.

Such careful practices are and will always be important, no matter the state of the economy. And when it comes to keeping customer data safe in these kinds of relationships, the stakes are even greater with a more educated consumer population and a Congress that is starting to bring the regulatory hammer down on the financial services industry.