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06/06/2026 1:36 am
TL;DR: Banks are shifting GRC from annual compliance exercises to continuous control, with identity governance now central to audit readiness, third-party risk, and fraud prevention according to SecurEnds. The decisive change is that access management is no longer a supporting control, but the operating layer that determines whether banking GRC actually holds.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by SecurEnds: GRC in banking and regulated industries
By the numbers:
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, 46% confirmed and 26% suspected.
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when banking GRC does not include identity governance?
A: Control ownership becomes hard to prove, access reviews become inconsistent, and audit evidence turns into a manual reconstruction exercise.
Q: Why do service accounts and privileged access complicate banking compliance?
A: They often bypass ordinary user lifecycle assumptions and can remain active without clear business ownership.
Q: How do security teams know if continuous compliance is actually working?
A: Look for shorter time-to-detect on control drift, fewer undocumented exceptions, and access review results that lead to measurable revocation.
Practitioner guidance
- Rebuild access governance around regulated systems Assign every critical application a business owner, technical owner, and review cadence.
- Include third-party identities in the same control workflow Bring vendor accounts, managed service access, and emergency credentials into the same joiner-mover-leaver process as internal users.
- Monitor privileged and service accounts continuously Track admin accounts, service accounts, and shared operational credentials for scope drift, stale ownership, and unused standing access.
What's in the full article
SecurEnds' full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Framework-by-framework banking GRC mapping across PCI DSS, SOX, Basel III, GDPR, and ISO 27001
- Identity governance workflows for access reviews, privileged accounts, and orphaned identity cleanup
- Automation patterns for recurring compliance tasks, evidence collection, and remediation tracking
- Banking use cases showing how control visibility changes across retail, investment, insurance, and FinTech environments
👉 Read SecurEnds' analysis of GRC in banking and regulated industries →
GRC in banking: what IAM teams need to change now?
Explore further
06/06/2026 2:49 am
Identity data is the control layer that banking GRC too often underestimates. The article is correct that risks become compliance failures when access is not governed continuously. In regulated environments, identity is where policy becomes enforceable or collapses into paperwork. Banks that cannot reconcile entitlements, owners, and revocation paths are not just missing an IAM feature, they are missing the evidence chain regulators expect.
A few things that frame the scale:
- The average organisation believes more than 1 in 5 of their non-human identities are insufficiently secured, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, 46% confirmed and 26% suspected.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should own third-party access risk in a banking GRC programme?
A: Business ownership and security ownership should be shared, but accountability must be explicit. Vendor risk teams need the contract context, IAM teams need the entitlement data, and control owners need evidence that access is revoked when the relationship ends. If no one owns the offboarding proof, the risk persists long after the vendor work is finished.
👉 Read our full editorial: GRC in banking is becoming identity centric, not audit centric
