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Like most people earlier this year, my wife and I expected to file our taxes, wait for our refund, and cross our fingers that we’d get enough back to splurge on a family beach trip (come on, Hilton Head Island!). Instead, we discovered we couldn’t receive our refund because someone had stolen my wife’s Social Security number and used it to obtain medical insurance. Apparently, someone in Texas had been living a very different version of her life, and the IRS understandably had a few questions.
The fraud itself wasn’t the part we struggled with most. Proving it wasn’t my wife was actually the hard part.
What came next was a painful process that stretched over several months, requiring us to gather documentation, complete multiple verification steps, and provide enough evidence for the IRS to restore confidence in her identity before they could process our refund. It wasn’t exactly how we had planned to spend our spring.
As frustrating as our experience was, it reminded me of conversations I regularly have with professionals responsible for third-party risk management (TPRM) within pharmaceutical and life sciences organizations. Every day, they’re faced with a similar challenge: determining whether a third party can be trusted throughout the entire business relationship, not just at the time of onboarding.
Every industry depends on third parties, and every industry brings its own set of risk management challenges. In pharmaceutical and life sciences organizations, those challenges are shaped by a combination of rigorous regulatory oversight, complex global supply chains, and an unwavering commitment to patient safety and product quality.
Contract research organizations (CROs), contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs), laboratories, logistics providers, ingredient suppliers, software vendors, distributors, consultants, and countless other partners all play an important role in bringing therapies and medical innovations to market. Each one also becomes an extension of the organization’s risk profile, making every relationship a potential source of operational, regulatory, and reputational risk.
For the professionals responsible for managing these relationships, the job extends well beyond onboarding suppliers. It’s about understanding whether every third party can meet the operational, ethical, regulatory, and security expectations that support safe, compliant, and resilient operations.
A single supplier may influence manufacturing quality, patient privacy, cybersecurity, business continuity, anti-bribery compliance, environmental reporting, and corporate reputation simultaneously. That means every onboarding decision is about more than approving a vendor. It’s about building confidence that the organization can responsibly support the products, services, or research that patients ultimately depend on.
One of the biggest misconceptions about TPRM in life sciences is that organizations simply need to comply with a single set of regulations. In reality, third-party risk professionals are often evaluating suppliers against overlapping requirements that include FDA regulations, European Medicines Agency (EMA) expectations, Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and broader GxP standards, HIPAA and HITECH privacy requirements, anti-bribery and anti-corruption obligations such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the UK Bribery Act, OECD guidance, ISO 37001, and an increasing focus on ESG initiatives, including Scope 3 emissions reporting.
Each of these frameworks introduces its own expectations, documentation requirements, and risk considerations. The challenge isn’t simply understanding each regulation individually; it’s understanding how they intersect around every third party entering your ecosystem. A single supplier may need to satisfy multiple regulatory expectations simultaneously, requiring TPRM professionals to build a holistic understanding of risk rather than viewing compliance through a single lens.
For pharmaceutical and life sciences organizations, the pressure goes beyond just needing to onboard third parties faster. It’s doing so without compromising patient safety, product quality, or regulatory compliance. Every decision involving a CRO, CMO, ingredient supplier, laboratory, or technology partner has the potential to affect manufacturing continuity, GxP compliance, and ultimately, patient outcomes.
That changes the role of third-party risk management.
The question is no longer whether a supplier can complete a questionnaire. It’s whether risk teams have enough intelligence to make confident decisions before the due diligence process is even underway.
Too often, organizations begin with limited context, spending valuable time gathering information that could already be available, including FDA warning letters or regulatory actions, sanctions exposure, adverse media, financial stability, cyber posture, ownership structure, and supply chain risks. By starting with trusted intelligence, reviewers can focus less on collecting facts and more on determining whether a third-party can support the organization’s quality, compliance, and operational objectives.
In an industry where every third-party decision can influence compliance, product quality, and patient safety, better intelligence doesn’t just accelerate due diligence. It leads to better decisions.
The future of TPRM isn’t about replacing experienced practitioners; it’s about equipping them with better tools that help them work more efficiently and make more informed decisions.
Sometimes that means interacting directly with AI through a conversational experience. Imagine being able to ask questions like:
At other times, AI should work quietly in the background, handling repetitive tasks that traditionally consume valuable time. That includes reviewing documents, extracting relevant information, pre-filling questionnaires, suggesting corrective actions, identifying historical patterns, and supporting consistent decision-making across the organization.
The best AI doesn’t replace human judgment. Instead, it complements the expertise of TPRM professionals by reducing manual effort, surfacing meaningful insights, and allowing them to focus on the decisions that require experience, context, and critical thinking.
At Aravo, we’ve worked alongside organizations with some of the world’s most mature third-party risk programs, including many in pharmaceutical and life sciences. One thing we’ve learned is that every organization manages risk differently, making flexibility essential.
Aravo’s Intelligence-First™ Platform enables organizations to configure workflows, data models, and multiple risk scorecards around their own regulatory requirements, whether the focus is FDA oversight, EMA expectations, GxP compliance, HIPAA, ESG reporting, anti-bribery requirements, or other evolving obligations.
That understanding becomes even more valuable when it’s informed by trusted intelligence from the very beginning. Through integrations with providers such as Threat.Digital, Dow Jones, Ground Truth Intelligence, Dun & Bradstreet, and Moody’s, organizations can enrich supplier profiles with sanctions, adverse media, cyber, financial, ownership, and reputational intelligence before reviews begin. Rather than spending valuable time gathering information, reviewers can focus on validating findings and making informed decisions. Threat.Digital, for example, surfaces multilingual adverse media, sanctions, politically exposed persons (PEPs), cyber sanctions intelligence, and concise AI-generated summaries directly within Aravo workflows.
Technology only creates value if people enjoy using it. That’s why Aravo emphasizes human-centered dashboards and intuitive questionnaires that simplify even the most detailed compliance processes. Interactive AI agents provide instant answers about third parties whenever additional context is needed, while behind-the-scenes workflow agents analyze documents, pre-fill questionnaires, recommend corrective actions, and support consistent decisions based on historical patterns.
For organizations managing Anti-Bribery and Anti-Corruption programs, Aravo also provides a dedicated ABAC solution aligned with globally recognized standards, including the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the UK Bribery Act, and ISO 37001, helping establish consistent and defensible compliance processes across the third-party ecosystem.
Looking back, what stayed with me most about our experience with identity theft wasn’t the fraud itself, but how difficult it became to restore trust once it had been compromised. That experience reinforced something I believe applies just as much to third-party risk management as it does to everyday life: the best decisions aren’t made with the most information, but with the right information, delivered at the right time and supported by meaningful context.
For pharmaceutical and life sciences organizations, that challenge will only continue to grow as regulations evolve, supply chains become more interconnected, and expectations around AI continue to increase. The organizations that will be best positioned for the future won’t simply collect more data; they’ll build smarter, intelligence-driven risk programs that empower their people to work more efficiently, remain compliant, and make better decisions with confidence.
In the end, third-party risk management is about much more than managing vendors. It’s about protecting patients, preserving trust, enabling innovation, and ensuring that every decision contributes to a stronger, more resilient organization.
On a final note, if all this talk about trust and intelligence has you thinking about risk, here’s one low-risk recommendation: Hilton Head Island is still worth the trip!
Aravo built its pharma and life sciences program for organizations that need to make faster, intelligence-driven third-party risk decisions.
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