Discover how Platformed’s full product suite helped business advisory and accounting firm significantly cut back time spent on security questionnaire admin

The customer: Advisory and accountancy firm

The customer is a leading UK business advisory and accountancy firm with global reach - serving clients from mid-sized to large privately-held corporates, non-profits, and individuals. It is focused on optimizing its clients financially, operationally, and strategically across Audit, Tax & Compliance, Accounts Advisory, Financial Planning, and Transaction Services.

The challenge: Giving internal teams their time back by streamlining the due diligence questionnaire process

Serving a wide breadth of clients across different geographies in a highly regulated industry while maintaining a fast growth trajectory had led to the firm balancing multiple due diligence questionnaires (DDQs) per month. With a manual process in place, the company’s Director of IT and its Finance Director were eager to find a solution that would reduce the amount of time spent on admin without compromising security or standard of quality for their prospects and clients.

In addition to security questionnaires, the firm’s internal teams were also handling multiple requests for access to policies and certifications. In an industry where trust is paramount and time is of the essence, the team were keen to find a solution that would allow external companies to self-service their questions without creating manual work internally but still maintaining strict access management to sensitive information.

The firm needed a solution that would solve for both pains in one platform:

• Free up time for its internal teams by removing the burden of disruptive, repetitive and time-consuming tasks
• Allow its compliance team to share certifications, documents, policies, and processes with prospects easily, without sacrificing its own security processes whilst ensuring a seamless experience for the prospect or customer

The solution: Platformed selected to speed up sales cycles and establish trust from day zero

Following a successful pilot, Platformed was selected as the firm’s partner of choice to unblock internal resources through its AI-powered risk management platform.

Through Platformed Respond, the AI-powered questionnaire platform, the firm has been able to respond to DDQs in a fifth of the time previously spent. The team uploaded historical questionnaires via Platformed Graph, an ever-learning and automatically maintained knowledgebase that feeds into Platformed Respond and generates responses to DDQs in the company voice, learning and adapting to changes so that the latest information is always used.

“One of the double-edged swords of growth is that you find your time being taken up with a lot more tasks. Particularly in an industry like ours where the product we’re selling is our time and expertise as a service. The ability to streamline the processes and cut back on time spent doing admin is a huge benefit to the company. Platformed has allowed us to automate our security questionnaire processes without compromising on quality and has saved us a massive amount of chargeable and non-chargeable time.”

Finance Director

Interested in learning more about Platformed and our product suite?Check out our demo for Respond, and explore more of our features

With information uploaded to Platformed Graph, a trust center was generated through Platformed Showcase in less than a day to allow its compliance team to establish trust with prospects from day zero. Platformed Showcase is auto-generated based on uploads and edits to Platformed Graph, relieving the teams of cumbersome administrative tasks to maintain a single source of truth.

“We operate in an industry that places a huge emphasis on trust and transparency. Having an NDA flow with our trust center through Platformed Showcase has enabled users to self-serve information with the safety of knowing exactly who is accessing our information and why. The integration with our existing system through DocuSign allows us to have minimal disruption internally and we’re now less of a bottleneck for incoming information requests.”

Director of IT

To see Platformed’s Showcase in action, check out a live example for one of Platformed’s other customers,vulnerability management provider, Intruder

Through Platformed, the firm is also able to access features such as ‘Ask Question’. This allows its team to ask individual ad-hoc questions, such as those around anti-bribery and tax evasion, and receive immediate and precise answers without spending time searching through internal documents or relying on internal subject matter experts. Built into the existing Platformed Graph infrastructure, this feature taps into the extensive knowledge Graph holds about an organization and delivers insightful responses in seconds.

The product: Platformed Respond and Platformed Showcase

Platformed Respond automates RFPs, RFIs, DDQs and SAQs - in whatever format they come. Get onboarded in less than a day:

• Accelerate your paper process - Import and export data and questionnaires in any format. Spreadsheets (e.g. Excel and CSV), documents (e.g. Word and PDF), online portals (e.g. OneTrust). If you find something Platformed can’t automate, our support team will handle it for you
• Automated, consistent, and high-quality responses - Fully automate your questionnaire responses while retaining control over word count, tone, and format. Save core responses for information that is unlikely to change (e.g. key business information and specific signed-off wording). Assign, notify, collaborate, and report with multiple teams within the platform
• Self-maintained and searchable knowledge base- Search and respond to full questionnaires or one-off questions with information that never goes out of date. Platformed plugs into multiple sources of truth and continuously learns while providing a comprehensive evidence trail

Interested in learning more about Platformed and our product suite?Check out our demo for our trust center, Showcase, and explore more of our features

Platformed Showcase is a trust center that puts you on the front foot, building trust from before the first conversation, demonstrating your trust credentials to current and future customers and partners

• Ready in less than a day and fully synchronised with automatic updates - Showcase is built using Platformed's powerful knowledge library, Graph. Content is auto-generated, keeping the work off your plate. As your business evolves, Showcase will draft updates to your trust center so it’s always accurate
• Self-service standard information and lock down access if needed - Allow your customers to self-service information and documents. With built in NDAs and approval workflows, your customers and prospects can access the documents they need
• Customizable and hosted on your own domain- Automatically generated does not mean cookie-cutter - attach custom JS/CSS, customize to match your brand identity, and host on your own subdomain. Your internal teams can review all content and changes before they are published to ensure complete accuracy
• Subprocessor management made easy - Point your customers to a live list of subprocessors

Trusted by innovative brands globally, Platformed is your integrated toolkit to navigate procurement and risk management processes. Platformed automatically builds and maintains a live graph of trust information about your organization, and empowers your team to showcase your trust credentials, respond to trust enquiries, and build trust with enterprises faster than ever before.

If you sell to enterprise organizations and have to balance multiple RFPs and questionnaires per month, Platformed can help to put your procurement pains to bed. Sign up for a demo with our team of experts, or get in touch to find out more.