Governance, risk and compliance have operated as three separate disciplines for decades, but GRC makes the case for running them as one connected system rather than three siloed exercises.
According to Copla, when they are kept apart, the result is a control nobody governs, a risk nobody owns, and evidence nobody can locate, precisely the gaps where regulatory compliance tends to fail.
Copla recently discussed what exactly is GRC, governance, risk and compliance, and how it is run as one system.
Governance covers who decides, who is accountable, and how that gets recorded, spanning risk appetite, role ownership, policy approval and reporting lines that carry problems upward before they become incidents. Risk management is the discipline of identifying what could go wrong, scoring likelihood and impact, and assigning ownership across operational, financial, legal, strategic and ICT risk categories, which frequently spill into one another.
Compliance then proves, with evidence a third party can check, that requirements are actually being met, and it inherits whatever governance and risk left behind.
The acronym traces back to OCEG, formerly the Open Compliance and Ethics Group, which was using it in the early 2000s before publishing the first peer-reviewed paper on the concept in 2007.
In the EU, GRC has moved from framework to law. Under DORA, Regulation (EU) 2022/2554, Article 5(2) requires a firm’s management body to define, approve and oversee its ICT risk management framework, with Article 5(4) mandating ongoing training. NIS2, Directive (EU) 2022/2555, imposes similar duties on essential and important entities, and Article 32(5)(b) even allows authorities to seek a temporary ban on a chief executive where deficiencies go unaddressed. Where scopes overlap, DORA takes precedence as the sector-specific act.
A working GRC framework functions as a chain: scope, dependencies, impact, controls, evidence, and programmes typically fail at the joins rather than within any single step. Scope determines which rules apply; dependency mapping shows what the business actually relies on; business impact analysis turns criticality into an analysed judgement rather than a guess; controls should be built around genuine exposure instead of a generic checklist; and evidence must be captured as work happens; reconstructing it before an audit rarely convinces a supervisor.
Crucially, most organisations facing these obligations have no dedicated risk committee or compliance function. Proportionality changes how much depth is expected, not whether the obligation applies, meaning a single named owner, documented governance and outside expert judgement can meet the bar that larger institutions meet with entire departments.
GRC software, meanwhile, only carries the record and routes the work. It cannot set scope or score risk, since both require business judgement the platform doesn’t have.
Read the full Copla post here.
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