By Martin Davies, Senior Audit Alliance Manager, Drata
Compliance has long sat in the cost column for most financial organisations. Keeping the regulators happy is essential to staying in business, but compliance activity is often time and resource-intensive, and isn’t seen as a direct revenue generator for the business so can easily be pushed back on the priority list.
This view holds true for many organisations. Yet with the growing importance of digital trust and resilience, more companies are appreciating the value of compliance as proof of reliability.
Financial institutions and fintechs are realising that regulatory alignment isn’t just about ticking boxes and avoiding penalties. It’s a way to show accountability and earn confidence from customers, investors, and partners.
Further, automation and continuous monitoring are turning what was once a static, paper-heavy exercise into living evidence of resilience. So how can financial firms make sure that compliance is held as a signal of trust, rather than simply the cost of doing business?
Why trust drives business decisions
Trust is a decisive factor in every financial partnership and transaction today. When buyers or investors assess a potential partner, they go through due diligence to ensure the chosen organisation is trustworthy and reliable.
Compliance with frameworks such as DORA, ISO 27001 or SOC 2 can be a critical factor in earning this trust, forming a shorthand for reliability that can carry as much weight as balance sheets or product performance.
In a highly competitive market, those financial organisations that can demonstrate a mature compliance posture will stand out, putting them in a prime position to accelerate deals and strengthen their market position.
If there are two firms of similar size and history offering the same product, the one that can prove its controls are tested and verified is more likely to win the business. This positions compliance as a powerful currency of trust in modern finance.
The end of static compliance
One of the reasons compliance has been framed as a cost for so many years is the reliance on manual audits with paper-heavy evidence trails. In the digital age, however, there is no reason for compliance to be so painstaking and cumbersome. Rather than the heavy lift of an annual audit, firms can take on a heavily automated approach of continuous assurance.
Automation enables organisations to collect and validate compliance data in real time, eliminating the manual effort that once made the process slow and error-prone. Instead of relying on information that is out of date as soon as it is collected, let alone by the time it reaches the board, real-time dashboards now provide live visibility of controls, incidents, and remediation efforts.
It’s much like managing a restaurant’s reputation. One bad review can tarnish years of good service, or a place once rated five stars may no longer meet that standard. In financial services, continuous and transparent compliance is essential to maintain trust and sustain business credibility.
Through an automated approach, it also allows financial institutions to identify risks as they emerge, not after the fact. Embedding automated monitoring into day-to-day operations repositions compliance as an active capability, not a retrospective task.
The importance of culture and collaboration
Compliance has historically been treated as a task for a single team or department, a mindset that has typically only added to its burden. In practice, effective compliance depends on collaboration across multiple business units, including risk, security, and operations.
There needs to be a feedback loop between Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) programmes, as well as other stakeholders and the wider workforce. Automation is helping to establish this by embedding compliance checks directly into existing workflows, helping to build a culture of accountability without slowing critical operations.
Alerts and actions can be managed by a central platform and flow to whoever owns a control, ensuring responsibilities are clear and progress is visible. This integrated approach both reduces friction and helps employees see compliance as part of performance rather than a barrier to it.
Continuous assurance is the new benchmark
Static certifications once served as proof of reliability, but today’s financial landscape demands something more dynamic. Likewise, a certification logo buried somewhere on the website isn’t enough – prospective partners and buyers are demanding more proof.
The most resilient organisations now operate with continuous assurance, maintaining ongoing visibility of their compliance posture through automated monitoring, evidence collection, and analytics that replace point in time checks with real insights.
Just as carbon neutrality became a badge of environmental responsibility, continuous compliance and assurance are becoming hallmarks of digital accountability. For banks and fintechs alike, compliance can no longer be a back-office function. Instead, it must stand as an upfront signal of trust and operational integrity in an interconnected financial world.