Know Your Vendor

proactively monitor compliance risk of vendors

Know Your Vendor (KYV) is Venmonitor’s first interactive compliance widget, built for 850+ clients to strengthen vendor risk management. I led the end-to-end design of KYV, creating a single interface to review, dismiss, and audit vendor risk hits. The result: a faster, more accountable workflow that turned compliance from manual effort into confident decision-making.

Industries

SaaS, Fintech, Risk, Security

Services

Product Design

Date

Dec 2023 - Feb 2024

Team

Product Manager, Engineers, Leadership

Problem Statement

Compliance teams spent hours chasing false information, leaving gaps in audit history and exposing organizations to compliance failures.

Teams spent hours sifting through sanction and PEP lists, switching between tools just to verify if a hit was real. This constant friction slowed reviews, introduced errors in record-keeping, and left gaps in audit history. Without a clear way to dismiss false hits and preserve context, organizations risked wasted effort, compliance failures, and lost confidence in their vendor risk reporting.

Key User Persona

Vendor Manager

  • Chooses the vendor to work with

  • Assesses vendor performance and identifies risks

  • Analyzes vendor reporting

  • Ensures vendors comply with company standards and policies 

Design Process

User Research and Insights

We interviewed 12 active Venmonitor users. Users required more than just a widget that surfaces the score.

Context Needed

Reviewing source links and adding notes without switching systems

Context Needed

Reviewing source links and adding notes without switching systems

Context Needed

Reviewing source links and adding notes without switching systems

Dismiss false

Mark irrelevant hits as false & remove risk calculations

Dismiss false

Mark irrelevant hits as false & remove risk calculations

Dismiss false

Mark irrelevant hits as false & remove risk calculations

Audit Trail

A reliable log of dismissed hits, with the ability to revisit

Audit Trail

A reliable log of dismissed hits, with the ability to revisit

Audit Trail

A reliable log of dismissed hits, with the ability to revisit

Real-time Confidence

Risk scores had to update instantly

Real-time Confidence

Risk scores had to update instantly

Real-time Confidence

Risk scores had to update instantly

Proposed User Flow

Identify false hits

Review details

Mark as false / add notes

Dismiss & update score

Final Solution

Step 1: Review score and Sanctions hits
Users can open a vendor’s sanctions results and see risk level, source links, and confidence scores. From here, they can mark hits as false, add notes, attach documents, or dismiss them.

Step 2: Reviewing PEP
Politically Exposed Person (PEP) results open in a modal with detailed profiles. Users can drill down into each name, view source data, and take the same review actions as sanctions.

Step 3: Score update and review dismissed
As hits are dismissed, the vendor’s overall risk score updates instantly. A dedicated “Dismissed Hits” log captures who dismissed the hit, when, and why - providing a transparent audit history.

Demo of final prototype

Sanctions hits

PEP hits

Impact and Outcome

  • 70% faster reviews by eliminating multi-tool switching.

  • Complete audit history ensured compliance confidence during external audits.

  • $20M+ product revenue impact (KYV became core to Venmonitor’s highest-grossing product).

  • Adoption: Increased user base for Venmonitor from 600 to 850+ in a year. Was high because the design mirrored compliance managers’ natural review process - review, mark, dismiss - instead of forcing a new workflow.

Always open to projects and great design chats — let’s talk!

San Francisco, CA, USA