Corporate compliance is never “done”. Manage risk continuously

In organizations with complex structures, multiple systems, distributed teams, and numerous suppliers, corporate compliance is a constant part of day-to-day risk management. Yet the greatest challenge is not simply creating policies or procedures. It is far more difficult to apply, update, and monitor them consistently in a dynamic business environment. That is why modern corporate compliance programs increasingly combine legal, organizational, process, and technology perspectives. Learn how to manage corporate compliance effectively.

Corporate compliance means ensuring that a company’s activities remain aligned with regulations, industry standards, internal policies, and recogonized best practices. In European organizations, the following areas are especially important:

• personal data protection (GDPR),
• anti-money laundering (AML),
• information security (ISMS, ISO 27001),
• sector-specific requirements (e.g., NIS2, DORA),
• proper bookkeeping and accounting practices,
• whistleblower protection.

However, corporate compliance management is not just about drafting security policies or understanding legal requirements. What matters far more is translating those requirements into specific processes, roles, and control mechanisms across the organization. So how can this be done effectively?

The primary purpose of corporate compliance is to protect companies on multiple levels, including against:

• cybercrime: compliance supports adherence to new digital resilience standards (NIS2, DORA) and helps protect against data breaches that may affect business continuity;
• administrative penalties: it helps prevent significant financial penalties, including those related to GDPR violations (up to EUR 20 million or 4% of annual global turnover, whichever is higher), breaches of EU and national labor regulations, or infringement of antitrust rules, where EU fines may reach up to 10% of annual worldwide turnover;
• criminal and financial liability of management: compliance helps protect board members from personal liability and governance risks related to company law, criminal law, and cybersecurity requirements such as NIS2;
• reputational damage: maintaining compliance helps detect internal misconduct before it is exposed publicly and turns into a reputational crisis.

To truly protect your company, corporate compliance must be embedded in concrete actions, clear accountabilities, and effective control mechanisms.

1. Analyze the regulations relevant to your company’s industry, structure, and scale of operations.
2. Check whether your current procedures, contracts, policies, and IT tools are up to date, easy to understand, and actually used in practice. Consider an independent IT security audit to verify how security practices are applied in day-to-day operations.
3. Identify the areas most vulnerable to non-compliance, such as GDPR, AML, taxes, labor law, or anti-corruption requirements.
4. Create a risk register, link risks to organizational assets (such as systems, applications, databases, documents, and infrastructure resources), and assess their likelihood as well as potential financial, legal, and reputational impact. A GRC (Governance, Risk, Compliance) platform: GoSecure can support this process by automatically calculating the company’s security level and helping reduce risks.
5. Assign risks to specific departments to clearly define accountability. GoSecure can also support this step by serving as an auditable source of information about who owns each security-related area within the organization.
6. Appoint a person or team responsible for compliance, ensuring independence from operational and sales departments.
7. Develop a compliance policy and detailed procedures tailored to the identified risks.
8. Implement a secure whistleblowing channel for employees and contractors.
9. Approve formal procedures and provide training and practical materials for employees.
10. Monitor compliance continuously, conduct regular audits, and update procedures whenever violations are detected or regulations change.

The final point is critical because effectively reducing the likelihood of the risks listed above requires continuous compliance improvement and management. As GoNextStage CEO Jacek Paudyn emphasizes:

The larger the company, the greater the challenge for those responsible for corporate compliance. A high number of assets, systems, suppliers, and regulations across the organization makes it increasingly difficult to maintain control using spreadsheets, email, or scattered registers alone.

That is why day-to-day compliance management should be supported by tools that organize all this information, such as the GRC-class platform GoSecure. The application:

• automatically assigns newly identified risks to the person responsible for responding to them;
• links risks to specific company assets;
• continuously monitors risks that are systemically connected to the appropriate company asset;
• enables a fast response to emerging compliance threats;
• supports compliance with regulations such as NIS2 and standards such as ISO 27001;
• documents actions by recording every decision, report, response, and corrective measure, which is important during audits, regulatory inspections, or incident analysis.

In this way, compliance becomes a permanent component of every business process. As a result, instead of reacting only after an incident occurs, the organization can continuously monitor where risks are emerging, who is responsible for them, and what actions have already been taken.

Why does this matter? Let’s look at the case of the National Bank of Greece as an example of corporate compliance violations.

In 2025, the Greek data protection authority imposed a total fine of EUR 120,000 on the National Bank of Greece for an incident involving the i-bank Pay application and the way the incident was handled.

The issue involved the incorrect linking of 24 customers’ phone numbers to other customers’ accounts, which resulted in erroneous transfers made through the IRIS service. The irregularity affected 25 customers and led to 38 incorrect transactions totaling EUR 2,149.66. The problem remained undetected for more than a year and a half.

When customers reported the first erroneous transfers in March 2022, the bank launched an analysis but initially identified the wrong root cause. It also provided one customer with incorrect information, stating that the phone number had previously been confirmed with a verification code. In addition, customers’ requests for access to their data were not properly treated as formal requests under Article 15 of the GDPR.

The actual source of the problem was identified only after an inspection by the Greek data protection authority in November 2023. The following day, the bank reported the breach, suspended the application, analyzed user accounts, compensated affected customers, and implemented technical fixes.

The supervisory authority pointed not only to the software error itself, but also to broader weaknesses in change and incident management. The concerns related not only to technical safeguards, but also to risk management and incident handling. The key issues included:

• control over risks related to system changes: insufficient quality testing before launching the production solution and the lack of safeguards preventing the activation of unverified numbers;
• delayed identification of the breach;
• improper handling of customer reports and requests: ineffective linkage between risks and specific regulations, applications, and data.

As this case shows, effective corporate compliance does not end with implementing procedures and safeguards. It requires continuously building an organizational culture based on awareness of and adherence to laws, regulations, and standards, as well as ongoing risk oversight and a fast, structured response to signals of irregularities. That is why it is worth investing in system-based solutions that help automate security and compliance management.

Corporate compliance is an ongoing risk management process that encompasses people, data, systems, suppliers, and everyday business decisions. The National Bank of Greece case shows that even a single configuration error can turn into a regulatory breach if an organization does not continuously monitor changes, responsibilities, and warning signals. Effective corporate compliance therefore requires not only knowledge of regulations, but also tools that systematically connect risks with assets, owners, incidents, and corrective actions—so that corporate compliance genuinely supports organizational resilience every day.