Sarah Hamilton

A compliance gap discovered during a quarterly audit is a compliance gap that has been open for months. For financial institutions under growing regulatory scrutiny, that lag between control failure and detec...

Every examination cycle raises the bar. OCC and FDIC examiners want to see how your institution identified its risks and whether that process can be repeated consistently. Quarterly manual reviews and ad hoc wo...

Every bank and credit union depends on third parties, yet many financial institutions still manage these relationships using legacy systems. A structured Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) program ...

An OCC examination closes. The team receives a list of findings. Someone opens a shared spreadsheet, and by the following week, two versions exist in different email threads, and nobody can say with certainty...

Regulatory expectations for banks and credit unions shifted more in the past 18 months than in the prior five years combined. Compliance teams are facing CRA modernization, evolving BSA/AML requirements, new OCC examination streamli...

Most governance risk and compliance systems promise the same things. What varies is what happens after implementation. Some platforms become the operational backbone of a compliance program while others collect dust as the complianc...

Regulatory expectations do not scale down for smaller balance sheets. A community bank with $500 million in assets faces the same BSA/AML obligations, the same CFPB fair lending scrutiny, and the same OCC examination standards as an i...

$206.1 billion. That is what global financial institutions spend on financial crime compliance every year, according to LexisNexis Risk Solutions (2023). This figure does not include the headcount, the consulting fees, the audit prepa...

Many financial institutions are under pressure to “do something with AI” while regulators sharpen their focus. A 2026 report by Wolters Kluwer Financial & Corporate Compliance notes that financial services leaders are doubling...

Community banking compliance refers to the set of processes, policies, and controls that locally owned and operated financial institutions must implement to adhere to federal and state laws, regulatory guidelines, and internal stand...