Truist is the sixth-largest commercial bank in the country, formed when BB&T and SunTrust merged in 2019. A bank that size buys a lot more than you would guess: technology and software, professional services, marketing and print, facilities and construction, staffing, security, food service, legal, and the long tail of office and operational spend that keeps thousands of branches running. If your company sells any of that, Truist is a real buyer worth pursuing.
The good news for smaller and diverse firms: Truist runs an open supplier registration process. You do not need an invitation to put your company in front of their sourcing team. The catch, which the bank states plainly, is that registering gets you visible, not hired.
What Truist actually buysThink in categories, not products. Banks of this scale spend the bulk of their procurement budget on indirect goods and services. The big buckets are IT and software, consulting and professional services, marketing and creative, real estate and facilities management, and human-capital services like staffing and training. There is also steady demand from the boring-but-reliable categories: janitorial, print, signage, courier, catering, and maintenance.
Before you register, get specific about which NAICS codes describe your work and where you have done it before. Truist sources nationally but has a heavy footprint across the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, a legacy of the BB&T and SunTrust networks. A vendor that can service branches in Charlotte, Atlanta, or Richmond is solving a problem the bank actually has.
How registration actually worksTruist runs supplier registration through a hosted portal at truist.supplierone.co (a SupplierOne instance, not SAP Ariba or Coupa). You create a profile, describe your capabilities, list your certifications, and the data becomes searchable by Truist's sourcing organization when they build out a sourcing project.
Read the bank's own language carefully, because it sets expectations honestly. Truist says completing registration is not an approval to do business with them and does not guarantee you will receive an RFI, RFP, RFQ, RFB, or a contract. Registration makes you findable. It is the price of admission, not the win.
That distinction matters for how you fill out the profile. A thin profile with a vague capability description is invisible in a database search. Use the exact category language a sourcing manager would type, name the certifications you hold, and quantify your experience. The goal is to surface when someone searches "minority-owned IT staffing firm, Southeast" and to look credible enough that they shortlist you.
If you have never built a clean one-pager that maps your capabilities to NAICS codes and past performance, do that first. Our capability-statement and certification tools are built to produce exactly the kind of profile that survives a buyer-side keyword search.
The diversity-certification angleTruist runs a named supplier-diversity effort and is direct about who qualifies. If your business is certified as minority-, women-, veteran-, disabled-, LGBT-, or small-business-owned, the bank says it wants to work with you. The requirement is a valid certificate from a recognized third-party certifier, not a self-declaration.
The certifiers Truist names:
- NMSDC (minority business enterprise / MBE)
- WBENC (women's business enterprise / WBE)
- USPAACC (the U.S. Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce)
- NGLCC (LGBT business enterprise / LGBTBE)
- NaVOBA (veteran and service-disabled veteran business enterprise)
- Disability:IN (disability-owned business enterprise / DOBE)
- SBA 8(a) (the federal program for socially and economically disadvantaged firms)
If you are not certified yet, this is the lever to pull before you spend energy on outreach. A diverse certification does two things at Truist. It makes you eligible for the supplier-diversity track, and it makes you countable toward the bank's reported diverse spend, which is a number large corporations actively manage. The most useful single credential for selling to a bank is usually the NMSDC MBE, because corporate procurement teams treat it as the gold standard. Our NMSDC certification guide walks through eligibility, the documents you need, and realistic timelines.
A certification does not replace capability. It gets your foot in a door that capability then has to walk through.
How to get noticed (and the Tier 2 side door)Registration is passive. Getting noticed is active. Three things move you from "in the database" toward "on the shortlist."
First, finish the profile completely and keep it current. Sourcing managers filter by category, certification, and geography. Empty fields drop you out of results.
Second, show up where the bank shows up. Truist participates in supplier-diversity events tied to councils like the National Minority Supplier Development Council and regional affiliates. A face and a follow-up beat a cold profile.
Third, and most underused: the Tier 2 program. This is the side door. Truist's Tier 2 effort asks its large strategic suppliers (its primes) to subcontract to qualified, capable diverse vendors when Truist cannot source from those vendors directly. If you cannot land a direct contract with the bank, you may still win work by becoming a subcontractor to a company that already holds a Truist contract.
The Tier 2 path is worth real effort because the buyer pool is larger than just Truist. The same prime relationships you build can carry into other corporations' Tier 2 programs. Identify the IT integrators, facilities firms, staffing agencies, and consultancies that serve large banks, and pitch them on the diverse-spend value you add to their reporting. You are selling them a way to hit their own subcontracting commitments while you get the work.
For dedicated certifier outreach or the current state of the registration portal, use the support channel inside the SupplierOne portal itself, since Truist routes supplier-diversity questions there rather than publishing a single inbox.
Where to start this weekPick the certification that fits your ownership and start it now, since that credential gates the diversity track and takes the longest. Build a capability statement that uses real category and NAICS language. Then register at the portal with a complete, search-optimized profile. In parallel, make a short list of Truist's likely primes and start Tier 2 conversations.
Truist is one of dozens of large corporate buyers running formal supplier-diversity and Tier 2 programs, and the same certifications and profile work travel across all of them. Browse the corporate program directory to line up the next handful of targets while your Truist registration is in motion.
