Standardizing Success: How We’re
Unifying Compliance Frameworks for Finance
and Beyond

We often write about common challenges in risk and compliance, and today we want to focus on inconsistent GRC frameworks in the financial services sector and beyond. Currently, the state of the industry is forcing finance teams to navigate a maze of overlapping requirements, redundant work, compliance gaps, and more. 

The lack of standardized approaches in GRC isn’t just inefficient; it also means that critical control gaps can easily go undetected in the spaces between frameworks. Security teams waste valuable time reconciling different control languages rather than addressing actual risks — and it becomes nearly impossible to achieve real-time visibility across the entire risk landscape. Rather than a robust security posture, organizations end up with a patchwork defense strategy. 

Today, we’ll discuss two major initiatives where RegScale is leading the charge toward standardized, efficient compliance processes. Although there’s still plenty of work to be done, we’re confident that these efforts are transforming how organizations approach GRC across sectors. 

Revolutionizing Financial Compliance with CRI

Let’s be honest: traditional compliance methods are holding back financial institutions and banks. Manual workflows, siloed systems, and static documentation create operational bottlenecks that drain resources and increase the chance of follow-up requests, MRAs, MRIAs, and heightened regulatory scrutiny.  

Our collaboration with the Cyber Risk Institute is changing all that. 

The relationship combines RegScale’s AI-powered automation with CRI’s common controls framework to fundamentally transform financial risk and compliance management. Financial institutions implementing our joint solution have already seen remarkable improvements: 

• 60% reduction in audit prep time
• 80% improvement in documentation accuracy
• 40% faster regulatory response times
• 10x scalability that frees up teams to focus on strategic priorities

As CRI’s first continuous controls monitoring affiliate, we’re shifting compliance from a reactive burden to a proactive advantage. The collaboration enables financial institutions to automate workflows through the “assess once, use many” approach across regulations. It also allows organizations to standardize controls mapping across the CRI Profile v2.0 and key global frameworks.

Shaping the Future of OSCAL Adoption

But finance isn’t the only industry that’s in serious need of a standardized approach. Enter OSCAL.

The Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL) represents the future of compliance in both the public sector and beyond. Best known for being used in FedRAMP certification, OSCAL is a machine-readable language that simplifies and standardizes security assessments through automation.  

Originally developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in collaboration with FedRAMP and industry partners, OSCAL enables compliance as code and aims to dramatically improve efficiency, timeliness, accuracy, and consistency for compliance teams. 

Earlier this month, RegScale became a founding member of the OSCAL Foundation, a groundbreaking NIST-led initiative that aims to standardize and streamline compliance requirements across industries. As part of the launch event, RegScale and CRI participated in key panels on the future of OSCAL in both FedRAMP and financial services. 

The Foundation will focus on six key objectives: 

• Adoption 
• Education
• Community 
• Development  
• Extension
• Internationalization

As the first-ever OSCAL-native continuous monitoring platform, RegScale’s solution is architected to provide full support for OSCAL catalogs, profiles, security plans, components, SAP/SAR, and POAMs. With our broader expertise in compliance as code, we’re looking forward to promoting OSCAL adoption across the public and private sectors alike.  

The Common Thread: Standardization and Efficiency

What connects these two RegScale milestones is our commitment to creating more efficient, standardized GRC processes across industries. Whether in financial services or other regulated sectors, the common challenges remain:

• Duplicative efforts across multiple regulatory frameworks
• Manual, time-consuming documentation
• Difficulty staying current with evolving requirements 
• Limited visibility into compliance status  

By automating processes and standardizing frameworks with CRI, RegScale is helping organizations reduce costs, accelerate certifications, and integrate compliance into their DevSecOps practices. Our mission is to continue driving innovations that transform GRC from a burden into a business advantage. 

If you’re interested in learning more about how we’re transforming the GRC industry, please visit our resource center. You can also learn more about the OSCAL Foundation here or check out our one-pager on the RegScale-CRI collaboration here.