How Crowe Supported a Bank’s GRC Program Transformation

Find out how Citizens Business Bank transformed its GRC program for centralization and scalability with help from the team at Crowe.

Company

Citizens Business Bank, a CVB Financial Corp. subsidiary, is a California-based commercial bank serving small and mid-sized businesses through relationship banking, commercial lending, treasury management, and specialized industry banking, including agriculture and dairy.

Challenge

The bank’s governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) program needed a transformation, as it was fragmented, with little ability to scale.

Support

Citizens Business Bank worked with Crowe on a ServiceNow^® integrated risk management (IRM) project to modernize, streamline, and centralize all the GRC data and activities conducted by the bank. Over the course of a seven-month period, Crowe implemented multiple key modules within ServiceNow’s IRM suite, followed by a 10-week deployment of a financial services operations (FSO) complaints module, using the Crowe Express Deployment for IRM approach.

Solution

The implementation resulted in a centralized system of record that dramatically reduced time spent on tasks, increased audit confidence, and built a scalable foundation for the bank’s future.

We had great existing processes but no centralized way to share information. Efficiency is one of our core values, and this implementation aligned with that perfectly.

– Michelle De Lorier, SVP, Risk Manager, Citizens Business Bank

The amount of work the Crowe team members accomplished between meetings was amazing. They never overpromised. They showed up prepared, stayed transparent, and kept the pace manageable for everyone involved. The Crowe project lead translated our needs into language his team could understand and vice versa. That’s not a skill everyone has.

– Mike Currie, SVP, Chief Information Officer, Citizens Business Bank

We came out the other side not just with what we asked for but with what we had hoped for – and that almost never happens.

– Michelle De Lorier

Challenge details

Team reviews performance charts together, representing collaborative bank implementation and measurable business improvements.

Faced with complex, spreadsheet-driven workflows and a growing need for scalability, audit readiness, and cross-functional visibility, the bank launched a multiphased ServiceNow implementation and worked with our team to solve a variety of issues, including:

Disparate risk assessments. Risk and compliance teams were conducting separate assessments across more than 125 business processes, each requiring manual coordination and analysis.
Scalability and inefficiency. Processes were highly manual, often requiring individual meetings and back-and-forth emails with business unit leaders to complete assessments.
Connecting complaints with compliance. No systematic ability was in place to link customer complaints and compliance activities.
Cost and time constraints. The bank needed a solution that would be delivered on time and within a tightly controlled budget.

Solution snapshot

Our team worked alongside the bank on a rapid, collaborative implementation that delivered immediate and long-term gains, including:

A centralized, scalable IRM platform

Risk, compliance, and information security activities were consolidated into a single ServiceNow environment to allow for streamlined workflows and shared data models that can grow with the bank.

Business unit self-service

Business users now receive automated assessments, complete tasks via a personalized portal, and have access to contextual guidance, which saves time.

Audit-ready documentation

Every change is time-stamped and traceable, which gives teams greater confidence and simplifies preparation for internal and external audits.

Complaint-to-compliance linkage

Complaints logged on the ServiceNow platform tie directly to applicable risk appetite statements and compliance obligations so the bank has greater insight into potential systemic issues.

Real-time reporting

Dashboards automatically populate as activities occur, eliminating the need for manual quarterly reporting and enabling faster decision-making.

Process automation

Routine fields such as due dates are autopopulated to reduce human error and maintain consistency across cases.

The results

Within seven months, four IRM modules were live, and a 10-week rollout of an FSO complaints module followed soon after. This speed was only possible because of the bank’s deep commitment to engaging in the project.