BLOG | Oct 9, 2025

How a Global Bank Nearly Eliminated Audit Response Time

Financial institutions operate under some of the world’s most demanding regulatory frameworks, including PCI DSS, SOX, GLBA, DORA, and GDPR. Yet despite billions spent annually on compliance, maintaining a continuously verified network posture remains one of the hardest challenges in the industry. This blog examines why traditional methods fail and how Forward Networks’ digital twin technology automates compliance validation, reducing audit effort by up to 99% while strengthening regulatory confidence.

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Dawn Slusher
Senior Manager, Content Marketing and Analyst Relations

Who should read this post?

CIOs, CISOs, and CTOs managing regulatory and operational resilience programs
Compliance and risk leaders in global banks, insurers, and fintech organizations
Network and security engineers supporting audit and reporting processes

What is covered in this content?

What is the escalating cost and complexity of financial network compliance
What are real-world results achieved through automated compliance validation
How a network digital twin delivers continuous verification and audit readiness

Why are manual compliance processes breaking down?

Across the financial sector, compliance teams face rising expectations from regulators and customers alike. Agencies such as the SEC, OCC, FDIC, CFPB, and the European Banking Authority now demand proof of continuous compliance—not point-in-time reports. Yet most financial institutions still depend on spreadsheets, manual command-line checks, and tribal knowledge to validate security controls. These methods can’t keep pace with networks built over decades through mergers and acquisitions, often spanning thousands of devices from dozens of vendors. The result is configuration drift, inconsistent policy enforcement, and reactive audit preparation that consumes an enormous amount of time and resources.

What is the real business cost of audit readiness?

The financial impact of compliance failure is staggering. The Ponemon Institute found that the average annual cost of non-compliance for a U.S. financial services firm is $14.82 million, nearly three times the $5.47 million cost of maintaining compliance (Ponemon Institute, 2023 Cost of Compliance Study).

Compared to pre-financial crisis spending levels, operating costs spent on compliance have increased by over 60 percent for retail and corporate banks according to Deloitte. Large institutions often spend 5,000–10,000 staff hours per major audit across security, network, and legal teams. This effort diverts engineers from strategic work while exposing the institution to operational and reputational risk.

In 2022, the SEC fined 16 Wall Street firms $1.8 billion for compliance failures—illustrating how quickly small documentation gaps can escalate into major financial events.

How does a network digital twin automate compliance?

The Forward Enterprise network digital twin creates a mathematically accurate model of every device, configuration, and path across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. This model continuously validates segmentation, configuration, and access policies against compliance frameworks like PCI DSS, SOX, NIST, and DORA.

Using the Network Query Engine (NQE), IT teams can continuously monitor their network identifying non-compliant configurations in seconds and (if enabled) automatically generate a ServiceNow ticket to begin remediating this issue before there is a problem. Users can customize the alerts to ensure they only receive relevant, current, and actionable information.

With every collection, the network digital twin verifies policy intent and issues alerts if drift occurs. Snapshots provide evidence for regulators, while integrations with ServiceNow, Slack, and Microsoft Teams streamline collaboration.

What results are financial institutions achieving?

Real-world results show the business value of automation. A global bank monitoring more than 1,000 interconnects used NQE to build an automated configuration auditor that runs daily. The outcome: audit time reduced by 99%, from 84 hours per month to minutes per day; $200,000 annual labor savings; engineers reallocated to higher-value tasks; and continuous visibility into compliance status across all partner connections.

In an IDC study, financial organizations using Forward Networks improved compliance team efficiency by 10.4%—equivalent to four full-time employees and nearly $400,000 in annual savings. Forward customers report that the platform’s continuously updated network model gives them the confidence to demonstrate compliance with certainty and avoid hiring additional FTEs for manual verification.

Want to see how financial institutions are automating compliance validation? Read the Use Case >

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