Industry Descriptor: A Major Regional Financial Services Leader with over $80B in Assets
The Challenge
As a major financial institution with multiple local banking brands across the Western U.S., this organization faced significant complexity in its governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) landscape. The institution struggled with fragmented data silos and manual, spreadsheet-heavy processes that made it difficult to maintain a real-time, unified view of enterprise risk. To satisfy rigorous regulatory expectations—including SOX, FFIEC, and OCC mandates—and support long-term growth, the organization needed to transition to a modern “system of action” that could harmonize policies, controls, and risks across its federated enterprise.
The Solution
The organization underwent a transformational implementation of ServiceNow IRM (Integrated Risk Management). The project established a service-informed governance architecture built on a “Configure, Don’t Compromise” philosophy to ensure long-term platform health.
Key project elements included:
- Unified Control Framework: Centralized overlapping requirements from various financial regulatory bodies into a single, “test once, satisfy many” control library.
- Automated Attestation Workflows: Launched structured, automated workflows for control owners to validate compliance and submit evidence directly within the platform, removing the need for “email chasing.”
- Service-Informed Governance: Linked IRM objects directly to the CMDB, ensuring that risk and compliance decisions were informed by the specific business services and technical assets they protected.
- Persona-Based Visibility: Deployed executive dashboards and workspaces tailored to different stakeholders—from risk analysts to board-level oversight—providing a live “Risk Portrait” of the entire organization.
The Impact
- Eliminated Operational Silos: Unified InfoSec, Risk, and Compliance teams under a single source of truth, reducing administrative friction and data redundancy.
- Accelerated Audit Readiness: Automation of evidence collection and recurring attestations significantly reduced the time required for internal and external audit preparation.
- Enhanced Decision Intelligence: Real-time visibility into control effectiveness allowed leadership to move from reactive compliance to proactive, data-driven risk management.
- Scalable Compliance Backbone: The new architecture established a future-ready foundation capable of supporting additional capabilities, such as Third-Party Risk and Business Continuity Management.
