Customer story · Fortune 100 financial services

How a Fortune 100 cut compliance workload by 80% with RiskWatch.

Twelve frameworks, three full-time compliance ops staff, fourteen-day evidence cycles, and a six-week audit-prep scramble every quarter. That was the program before RiskWatch. After consolidating onto one cross-mapped control library, the same team ships an audit-ready evidence pack in days, not weeks.

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Anonymized at the customer’s request. Fortune 100 financial services holding company, 90,000+ employees, multi-jurisdictional. Customer confidentiality protected per non-disclosure terms in the master services agreement. Metrics verified by the customer’s VP of Risk & Compliance prior to publication.

Before RiskWatch Manual

Frameworks tracked12+ spreadsheets

Evidence collection14-day cycles

Audit-prep window6 weeks / quarter

FTEs on compliance ops3 dedicated

After RiskWatch Live

Frameworks1 cross-mapped library

Evidence collectionContinuous

Audit-prep windowDays, not weeks

FTEs reallocated2.4 of 3

80% workload reduction

The numbers

Outcomes the VP of Risk & Compliance signed off on.

Measured against the 12-month period before RiskWatch was adopted and the 12 months after the platform was live across all in-scope business units. Numbers verified by the customer prior to publication.

80%

Compliance workload reduction

vs the pre-RiskWatch program baseline

14→ 2d

Evidence collection cycle

from a 14-day manual chase to a continuous vault refresh

12→ 1

Control libraries consolidated

twelve framework spreadsheets to one cross-mapped library

6w→ 4d

Audit-prep time per quarter

audit packs assemble in days, not the old six-week scramble

2.4FTE

Compliance-ops capacity returned

of the three FTEs running the old program, freed for risk work

The challenge

The program worked. It just consumed half the year to do it.

When the customer’s VP of Risk & Compliance scoped the evaluation, the briefing document named four costs the program was paying every quarter. None of them were about whether compliance was being met, all four were about what it cost the team to meet it.

Pain #1

Twelve framework spreadsheets, no single source of truth.

The program was running ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, GDPR, FFIEC, NYDFS Part 500, GLBA, SOX, NIST CSF, ISO 27701, and the firm-internal control set, each in a separate workbook with overlapping controls scored differently. Auditors caught the inconsistencies. The team caught them too, after the fact.

Pain #2

Evidence chased by email, every audit cycle, every framework.

Each audit started with a 14-day evidence-collection sprint, the same screenshots, the same access reviews, the same vendor SOC reports requested over and over. Evidence lived in personal SharePoint folders, email threads, and one analyst’s OneDrive. Reuse across audits was theoretical.

Pain #3

Six-week audit-prep scramble, every quarter.

Quarterly attestation cycles for SOX plus rolling external audits for SOC 2 Type 2 and PCI DSS meant the team spent roughly half the year in audit-prep mode. The remaining half went to remediation of the findings from the prior cycle. There was no quarter that felt normal.

Pain #4

Three FTEs running the program, zero capacity for risk work.

Three dedicated compliance-ops analysts were the bottleneck, plus rotating contributions from twelve control owners across IT, security, legal, and finance. The team’s enterprise risk register sat un-refreshed for six months because compliance ops consumed every available hour.

The approach

Six modules. One control library. Twelve audits.

The customer didn’t rip and replace. They ran RiskWatch in parallel for one audit cycle, NIST 800-53 r5 anchored, then migrated the remaining eleven framework spreadsheets into the cross-mapping over the next two quarters.

Cross-mapping engine

One control library, twelve frameworks satisfied.

Every control in the unified library carries a fan-out mapping to ISO 27001 Annex A, SOC 2 trust services, PCI DSS v4.0.1 requirements, NIST 800-53 r5 control families, FFIEC IT booklets, NYDFS Part 500 sections, and the firm-internal control taxonomy. Score one control, satisfy twelve audits.

Evidence vault

Year-round capture replaces the 14-day chase.

Evidence linked to controls, controls linked to clauses. Same SOC report satisfies every framework that asks for it. Auditors pull evidence packs from the vault, the compliance team stops being the routing layer.

Survey-based assessments

Control owners attest in their own modules.

Twelve control-owner surveys ship quarterly, each scoped to the controls a single owner is responsible for. Evidence uploaded to the survey lands in the vault tagged to every framework that needs it. No control owner sees a framework name they don't recognize.

Audit-ready reports

Audit packs assemble in days, not weeks.

Per-framework audit packs auto-assemble from the vault: scope statement, control inventory, attestations, evidence inventory, exception register, and remediation history. The customer's external auditor reviews the pack inside the platform.

Vendor risk module

Third-party SOC reports indexed against the same library.

Every vendor SOC 2 report uploaded once and mapped to the controls the vendor inherits coverage for. Critical vendor renewals trigger the new SOC report request automatically. PCI DSS Requirement 12.8 satisfied for the whole vendor population.

Control library

40+ pre-built libraries, one chosen as the anchor.

RiskWatch ships with control libraries for ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, NIST CSF, HIPAA, GDPR, GLBA, FFIEC, NYDFS, SOX, ISO 27701, and 30+ others. The customer picked NIST 800-53 r5 as the anchor library and pulled cross-mappings to every other framework they run.

We didn’t need a tool that could score one framework. We needed one library, one evidence vault, and one cross-mapping that meant twelve audits stopped feeling like twelve audits. Audit-prep stopped being our whole calendar. That’s the line I’d use to explain it to my board.

VP, Risk & Compliance

Fortune 100 financial services holding company · 90,000+ employees · multi-jurisdictional

↓ 80%Compliance workloadyear-over-year, signed off by VP

↓ 91%Audit-prep window6 weeks → 4 days per cycle

2.4 of 3FTE capacity returnedreallocated to enterprise risk

Implementation timeline

Kickoff to twelve-framework steady state, in under a year.

The customer treated this as a one-audit-at-a-time migration, not a big-bang cutover. Below is the path they took, with the outcome verified at each milestone before the next framework was added to the platform.

Stage 01 · Kickoff

NIST 800-53 r5 selected as the anchor control library.

Discovery session with the customer's VP of Risk & Compliance, three control-domain leads (IT, security, finance), and the RiskWatch solutions consultant. Twelve in-scope frameworks reviewed against NIST 800-53 r5 to confirm cross-mapping coverage. Scope statement signed off in week one.

Anchor library + 12-framework scope locked.

Stage 02 · Parallel run

First framework migrated, SOC 2 Type 2 audit run from the platform.

Control inventory imported from the prior SOC 2 spreadsheet. Eight control-owner surveys deployed, evidence vault populated with the prior audit's artifacts plus a delta refresh. Customer's external auditor reviewed evidence inside RiskWatch rather than receiving a separate evidence pack.

SOC 2 Type 2 audit closed in 11 days vs the prior 38.

Stage 03 · Multi-framework live

ISO 27001, PCI DSS, FFIEC, and NYDFS Part 500 added on top of the same library.

Cross-mapping engine surfaced 64% control overlap across the four newly-added frameworks. Survey templates extended, no new control-owner surveys created, existing surveys re-tagged with the new framework IDs. SOX attestation cycle (next quarter) prepared inside the same vault.

5 of 12 frameworks running off one control library.

Stage 04 · Steady state

All twelve frameworks migrated. 2.4 of 3 FTEs reallocated to enterprise risk.

The full framework portfolio runs from the unified control library. Audit packs assemble in days. Quarterly attestation cycles satisfied by the same control-owner surveys, no parallel evidence requests. The enterprise risk register, dormant for six months pre-RiskWatch, refreshes monthly.

80% compliance workload reduction, signed off by the VP.

Frameworks deployed

Twelve frameworks. One cross-mapped library.

NIST 800-53 r5 carries the control taxonomy. Every other framework the customer runs is satisfied via cross-mapping fan-out from the same control population, scored once, attested once, evidenced once.

Anchor

NIST 800-53 r5

Anchor library · federal control catalog

ISO 27001:2022

ISMS · 93 Annex A controls · global certification

SOC 2 Type 2

AICPA trust services · US enterprise sales

PCI DSS v4.0.1

Card-data environment · payment flows

FFIEC

Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council booklets

NYDFS Part 500

New York Department of Financial Services cybersecurity

GLBA

Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act · consumer financial privacy

SOX (ICFR)

Sarbanes-Oxley · internal control over financial reporting

GDPR

EU data protection · multi-jurisdictional ops

NIST CSF 2.0

Outcome-based framework · board-level reporting

ISO 27701

Privacy information management extension

Firm-internal control set

Enterprise-wide internal policies + standards

Trusted by 1,500+ risk and compliance teams

Ready to run yours?

Twelve frameworks. One library. Your audit calendar back.

See the same cross-mapping engine, evidence vault, and audit-pack builder this Fortune 100 used to cut compliance workload by 80%. A 30-minute walkthrough is enough to know whether RiskWatch fits the program you run.

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