Watch the Recording: How Nation Safe Drivers Assesses Third-Party Risk with Trust Chain

When Donna Vazquez joined Nation Safe Drivers as Director of Risk Management, she built the company's vendor due diligence program from scratch. The first version ran on spreadsheets, manual follow-ups, and a lot of email. It worked, but it wasn't scalable. Vendor assessments took up to 30 days, and Donna still had an entire backlog of vendors she couldn't get to.

In this conversation, Donna joins Strike Graph CEO Justin Beals to share what changed when Nation Safe Drivers moved to Trust Chain, and what it looks like to run a modern, evidence-based TPRM program in practice.

Jump to the moments that matter most:

• 0:32 — Donna introduces Nation Safe Drivers and her role building the company's risk framework from the ground up
• 4:23 — What the manual vendor due diligence process actually looked like, and why the first year was painful
• 8:52 — The real cost of a manual process: a growing backlog of vendors she couldn't get to
• 9:21 — How Donna came to Trust Chain as an early pilot customer, and what drew her in
• 11:18 — First impressions of AI-powered evidence evaluation, and how it cut her 30-day assessment cycle to under a week for critical vendors
• 15:25 — How Donna thought about AI risk and accuracy, and the accommodations built in for vendors who pushed back
• 19:18 — Vendor response rates and what 60% of her vendors said about the new process
• 21:00 — How Trust Chain worked so efficiently that Donna ran out of vendor due diligence in the first two months of 2026
• 24:27 — How Donna determines vendor risk tiers and calibrates assessment requirements by service type
• 26:04 — Live product demo: the Trust Chain dashboard, evidence requests, and Verify AI analysis in action
• 31:53 — How Donna structures evidence expiration schedules and hands off vendor follow-ups to the platform
• 34:05 — What Donna did with the time she got back, including expanding her program to cover more vendors
• 35:10 — How the CFO reacted to Trust Chain's dashboard reporting during quarterly business reviews
• 38:01 — Donna on what it's like to work with a vendor that actually listens

Donna's experience is candid, specific, and grounded in the realities of running a risk program that isn't your full-time job. She covers how she cut assessment time from 30 days to under a week, what it actually took to get vendors comfortable submitting documentation instead of filling out a form, and what she did with the time she got back. You'll also hear how Trust Chain's Verify AI layer changed the way she evaluates vendor evidence, how her auditors responded to the new process, and what her CFO said when he saw the dashboard for the first time.

If you're evaluating TPRM solutions or looking to get more out of your current process, this one is worth your time.