Governance, risk and compliance, better known as GRC, are three disciplines that have traditionally operated in isolation, despite serving the same underlying objective. Increasingly, the case for treating them as a single connected system is being made not just by industry bodies, but by regulation itself.
According to Copla, When governance, risk and compliance run separately, gaps appear exactly where accountability is needed most: controls without owners, risks nobody tracks, and evidence that cannot be produced on demand.
Copla recently discussed what exactly is GRC, governance, risk and compliance, and how it is run as one system.
Governance defines who holds decision-making authority and how that authority is recorded, covering everything from setting risk appetite to maintaining reporting lines that flag problems before they escalate into incidents. Risk management identifies what could go wrong, scores its likelihood and impact, and assigns ownership for mitigating it, spanning operational, financial, legal, strategic and ICT risk categories that frequently overlap in practice. Compliance then proves that requirements, whether regulatory, standards-based or internal, are being met, with evidence that can withstand scrutiny from an external auditor or supervisor.
The concept traces back to OCEG, the Open Compliance and Ethics Group, which says it began using the acronym in the early 2000s following a wave of corporate governance failures, with its GRC Capability Model still shaping how the discipline is defined today.
Within the EU, this framework carries direct legal weight. Under the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), Regulation (EU) 2022/2554, the management body of a regulated financial entity must define, approve and take responsibility for its ICT risk management framework, with ongoing training obligations attached. NIS2, Directive (EU) 2022/2555, extends comparable accountability to essential and important entities, allowing authorities to pursue liability against individual executives, including the temporary suspension of a chief executive where deficiencies go unaddressed. Where an entity falls under both regimes, DORA takes precedence as the sector-specific act.
Building a working GRC framework follows a sequence: establishing scope, mapping dependencies, assessing business impact, applying proportionate controls, then evidencing and reporting outcomes. Organisations without a dedicated risk or compliance function are not exempt; proportionality changes how the work gets done, not whether the obligation applies. That typically means a single named owner, documented governance in place of a formal committee, supporting technology, and external expertise brought in where needed.
The wider GRC software market reflects this complexity, spanning platforms built for automated evidence collection, enterprise risk suites, standalone point tools, and advisory services with software attached, each solving a different part of the same problem rather than competing on equal terms.
Read the full Copla post here.
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
