How a Financial Services Provider Created a Connected GRC Engine

^Problem

Disjointed tools jeopardized audit readiness and control

A newly launched cloud-native digital bank faced the critical challenge of establishing strong compliance and audit frameworks in one of the most tightly regulated industries.

As a newly launched institution, the team needed to build its Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) infrastructure from the ground up. But their efforts were hampered by disjointed tools like Excel and Airtable, which couldn’t support the complexity or accountability required in a financial environment. Excel created version control conflicts and lacked relational depth, while Airtable, though more modern, still fell short on key enterprise features.

“Excel has a lot of limitations. People fight about hiding columns and filtering, and you can’t do one-to-many relationships. Airtable was better, but lacked features I needed,” said the CISO.

Day-to-day operations were filled with friction—inefficient task management, limited visibility into recommendation tracking, and no reliable audit trails. As compliance demands mounted, the digital bank needed a centralized, structured system capable of linking findings, risks, procedures, and controls into one cohesive and secure environment.

Q1

^Solution

SmartSuite anchors a Financial Services Provider's GRC Foundation

The financial services provider turned to SmartSuite to consolidate their compliance and audit frameworks. They built an ecosystem of over 100 linked tables covering systems, risks, findings, procedures, and more. With SmartSuite’s flexible architecture, they developed:

• A CMDB-style system to map processes, data, and risk
• Custom dashboards to monitor open recommendations and their severity by department
• Automated lookup fields to cascade severity data from findings to recommendations
• Workarounds like a history table to track field-level changes for audit logs

Where the team wanted capabilities beyond what was available at the time — right-to-left text, dynamic filters on certain widgets — it handled them internally. The team created their own RTL browser add-on and developed backup automations and history tracking solutions within the platform itself.

“I built my own backup program, automations to capture historical field changes, and even RTL browser add-ons,” said the team lead.

Q2

^Results

SmartSuite Powers Traceable, Regulator-Ready Compliance

SmartSuite became the central operating system for audit tracking, issue remediation, and GRC visibility at the financial services provider. The internal audit team created real-time dashboards showing status by department and audit, allowing management and regulators to get immediate answers.

With automations tracking field changes, even compliance with regulatory audits became more efficient. “We assign due dates, change replies, and have a linked history of what was changed and when — it's all traceable,” said the team lead.

Where native features were not yet available at the time, such as downloadable audit logs or visual drill-downs, the organization built its own — from in-platform history tables to controlled external exports for regulators.