Shared Control Foundations Across Compliance, Financial Crime, and Enterprise Risk

This IDC Perspective discusses financial institutions that are entering a phase where compliance, financial crime, and enterprise risk can no longer be managed as isolated technology or governance domains. While regulatory frameworks remain distinct, the vendor landscape, data foundations, and control capabilities increasingly overlap. Market behavior shows vendors expanding across segments to support shared needs in identity, data governance, resilience, model oversight, and third-party risk, while institutions respond by coordinating more closely across historically separate functions. This convergence is not eliminating specialization but creating a layered ecosystem where focused solutions coexist with broader platforms built on common data and metadata.For technology buyers, this shift creates a clear strategic choice. Institutions can continue optimizing within silos; accepting higher long-term cost, complexity, and audit friction; or they can treat shared controls and governance as enterprise infrastructure. The latter approach improves scalability, lowers the marginal cost of regulatory change, and enables more advanced automation, including agentic AI, without undermining accountability. As regulators emphasize operational effectiveness, explainability, and continuous assurance, shared control architectures are emerging as a practical response rather than an abstract design preference. Institutions that anchor investment decisions at the enterprise level position compliance not only as a defensive requirement but as a foundation for efficiency, growth, and sustained trust."Convergence across compliance, financial crime, and enterprise risk is no longer a matter of organizational alignment. It reflects how controls are executed in modern financial institutions," said Sam Abadir, research director, Risk, Compliance, and Financial Crime, IDC. "As data, identity, resilience, and model governance become shared foundations, the effectiveness of any one program increasingly depends on the integrity of the whole. Institutions that invest in these shared control layers are not simplifying regulations. They are creating the conditions to scale automation, absorb regulatory change, and demonstrate accountability with greater confidence and lower long-term cost."