A Transfer Impact Assessment is the written record of a data exporter's analysis of whether a third country provides essentially equivalent protection for personal data being transferred under Standard Contractual Clauses. Schrems II created the requirement. The European Data Protection Board's Recommendations 01/2020 provide the methodology most teams use.
The assessment runs in six steps. Map the transfer. Identify the legal basis (typically the SCCs). Assess the laws and practices of the receiving country, especially around government surveillance access. Identify and adopt supplementary measures if needed (technical, contractual, organizational). Take any required procedural steps. Reassess on a defined cadence.
In practice, TIAs are most often done at the receiving-country level rather than per transfer. A multinational with US-bound flows produces one TIA for the United States, refreshes it annually, and references it in its DPAs. Same for India, Singapore, Israel, or any other major destination. The EU-US Data Privacy Framework has restored adequacy for participating organizations, so the TIA requirement applies less to mainstream EU-to-US flows than it did between 2020 and 2023, but it still applies to every non-adequate jurisdiction.
The output is a document, signed off internally, that an EU regulator can ask to see. Procurement reviews increasingly ask vendors whether they have a TIA on file for the receiving countries the buyer's data may end up in. Saying yes (and producing the document) is a credibility marker. Saying no, or producing something that reads like a template with no actual analysis, is a procurement red flag.