GRC for banks and financial groups
A bank answers to a prudential regulator, a cyber authority, and a privacy authority at once, and each one asks for evidence in its own shape. Sentinel Unity keeps them on a single control library, so one tested control answers all three rather than three programmes collecting the same evidence separately.
Inherent risk factors
- Data classificationConfidential,
- System access levelPrivileged,
- Service criticalityHigh,
- Fourth-party reliancePresent,
Knockout rule applied. Privileged access to confidential data forces Tier 1, whatever the computed score says.
Industry challenges
What banking GRC teams face
The pattern repeats across markets: overlapping regulators, a long vendor tail, and a board that wants one number.
Overlapping regulators
Obligations from different authorities cover the same ground in different words. Run them as separate programmes and the same control gets tested several times a year by different people.
Vendor and fourth-party concentration
Critical services sit with a handful of providers, who in turn depend on providers of their own. The exposure that matters is often one level below the contract you signed.
Examinations on short notice
An examiner asks how a control is operating and expects the assessment, the evidence, the open findings, and the remediation plan behind it, not a slide deck assembled that week.
Risk stated in money
Boards and capital committees ask what the exposure is worth. A colour on a heat map does not answer that question.
Maker and checker separation
The person who raises a record should not be the person who approves it, and that separation has to be demonstrable rather than asserted in a policy document.
Group structure against operating structure
Regulators care about the legal entity. Work happens in departments and branches. Reporting has to hold both at once.
Platform value
Built for regulated financial institutions
Frameworks & Controls
One control, every standard that cites it
A control carries a graded mapping to each standard that references it, with one marked primary. Mappings are levelled rather than yes or no, so partial coverage is visible instead of hidden.
Third-Party Risk
Tiering with knockout rules and fourth parties
Tier factors and scoring bands place each vendor, knockout rules stop a disqualifying answer from being averaged away, and fourth-party links record who your providers depend on.
Enterprise Risk
Quantitative analysis, not only heat maps
Model a risk with distributions to get a monetary range, record actual loss events against it, and hold appetite and tolerance so breaches surface as events rather than opinions.
Compliance
Assessments with a defined maturity scale
Six levels from Not Performed through Continuously Improving, each with written descriptors, so a score means the same thing in two different business units.
Access Control
Segregation of duties as declared rules
Conflicts are rules the system enforces, permissions attach to individual lifecycle steps, and where an exception is genuinely needed it is recorded rather than quietly granted.
Reporting
Committee packs on a schedule
Scheduled report runs, share links with an access log, webhook subscriptions, and BI export, so the quarterly pack is generated from live data rather than rebuilt by hand.
Frameworks for your program
Common group-level anchor, with Annex A controls mapped to everything else you run.
View framework →Function-level view for boards that want posture summarised without losing the detail underneath.
View framework →An example of a financial-sector cyber framework held in the library. Your own regulator is added the same way.
View framework →See your own frameworks running on one control library
Book a walkthrough with our GRC specialists and see the platform run against the frameworks you are held to.
No commitment required. A typical demo runs 45 minutes.