Your risk and compliance functions are probably costing you more than they should. Not just in budget, but in drag.
When your functions are siloed, they create redundant work, blind spots and a bad habit of reactivity that stops your business from looking ahead. Compliance might feel like it boils down to a series of audits, while risks feel like a vague list of hypotheticals.
So, what’s the alternative?
Our suggestion is to properly fuse them in your framework. Think of an integrated system where compliance data provides a real-time feed into your risk model – like a weather forecast for business uncertainty.
This 5-step risk management process shows you how to build it.
Step 1: Conduct a brutally honest risk assessment
To build a solid foundation, you need to map your obligations directly to what could actually go wrong – but most risk assessments are too polite. They list regulations and what requirements you need to meet without connecting them to the specific operational points of failure in your business.
Start by cataloguing every compliance obligation – from data privacy laws like GDPR to your own internal code of conduct. Then, for each one, ask the critical questions: “How likely is this issue to arise in our business processes – and what would be the immediate consequence?”
For example:
- Obligation: anti-bribery and corruption laws
- Process at risk: the third-party vendor onboarding and payment approval process
- Consequence: a rushed approval leads to engaging a sanctioned entity – leading to fines, frozen payments and immediate reputational harm
This exercise forces you to move beyond a vague list of “risks” and identify the precise operational gears that can grind your business to a halt. This is your high-priority map.
Step 2: Build a framework that breathes
Your compliance framework cannot be a static document. A policy binder that’s only opened during an audit is useless. A modern framework is a dynamic, living system that is embedded in the tools your employees use every day.
The key is to define clear, non-negotiable controls and then assign unambiguous ownership. Who is responsible for ensuring customer data is classified correctly at intake? Who has the authority to approve high-value transactions? Assigning ownership to a role, not just a person, ensures control doesn’t vanish when someone leaves the company.
Crucially, this framework must be designed for updates. When a new regulation appears or a business unit launches a new product, the framework should prompt a review of the relevant controls. That moves you away from working from historical records to current blueprints.
Step 3: Switch to continuous, tech-powered monitoring
Annual audits tell you what went wrong last year. Continuous monitoring tells you what is going wrong right now. This is the biggest operational shift you can make – and it’s impossible without technology.
Effective monitoring isn’t about watching everything. It’s more about watching the right things. Using your risk assessment from Step 1, you can identify your key control points and automate the oversight process. Instead of manually sampling transactions, technology can, for example:
- Flag 100% of expense claims that deviate from policy in real-time
- Alert you the moment a user with privileged access logs into a critical system outside of business hours
- Identify vendors that have not completed their required compliance certifications before an invoice is paid
This moves your team from forensics to diagnostics, so you’re no longer an archaeologist digging up old problems. Instead, you’re a technician reading a live dashboard, ready to make an adjustment before the engine fails.
Step 4: Create a single source of truth for risk
This is where you tear down the silos. The data from your compliance monitoring (Step 3) is a powerful intelligence feed for your risk management strategy. Letting it sit in a separate compliance dashboard is a massive waste.
Integration means creating a workflow where a compliance signal automatically informs your risk profile. Consider this scenario:
- The compliance signal – The whistleblower hotline sees a 30% increase in reports related to a specific business unit
- The risk blind spot – Separately, the HR risk team is assessing employee turnover but sees no major red flags in that same unit… yet
In an integrated system, the spike in whistleblower reports is immediately routed as a data point to the HR risk model. Your organization now sees a clear leading indicator of a problematic team culture or management failure, allowing for intervention before mass resignations or a lawsuit. This creates a unified signal intelligence system, giving you a high-fidelity view of what’s happening on the ground.
Step 5: Focus on fixing processes, not just incidents
Finding and fixing a single non-compliant transaction is necessary, but it’s not much of an achievement by itself. A mature program uses every failure as an opportunity to improve the underlying process.
The last of these key risk management steps is a simple, powerful loop:
- Find the flaw – Use your monitoring to isolate a problem. For example, a salesperson has promised a client product features that don’t exist.
- Fix the process – Don’t just discipline the employee. Why did it happen? Was the marketing collateral misleading? Is the commission structure incentivizing bad behavior? Find and fix the root cause, monitoring change over time.
- Prove the value – When you report to leadership, don’t just present a list of problems you fixed. Frame it as ROI. “We identified a flaw in our sales process that created a 25% higher risk of customer churn. With these three changes, we’ve closed that gap and protected future revenue.” This is how you prove your program is a business enabler and not a cost center.
The framework built through these five compliance risk management process steps means you can stop guessing where the operational landmines are buried. You’ll know where they are, you’ll know why they’re there and you’ll have the intelligence to build a safer path around them.
Ready to stop managing risk with disconnected spreadsheets and rearview-mirror reports?
Trade that overused magnifying glass for a radar system and improve how you use your data in your risk management processes today. NAVEX Risk & Governance solutions give you the real-time visibility you need to manage and monitor risk.
