Success Story.

Proving Trust Under Pressure: How a large Community Bank Earned a Zero-Exception SOC 2 Type II Report in Seven Months

A regional community bank with a $3+ billion asset base and rapidly growing digital banking products found itself needing to prove its security posture time after time to enterprise customers, FinTechs, and regulatory agencies alike. The bank had no mechanism to reliably collect that evidence. Still, working with YASH Technologies created an entire control framework built on automated evidence collection and closed-loop auditing, achieving SOC 2 Type II compliance in seven months without exception.

Client Objectives and Challenges

Compliance was now an obstacle to sales. The bank needed audit-quality evidence to prove its controls, yet the way it was collecting and reporting on evidence had nearly precluded its ability to do so:

Metadata Evidence Collection: The compliance team manually compiled audit evidence using Excel, without any central repository for control documentation.

An Incomplete History of Audits: A previous audit by a CPA firm lasted 14 months and ended with many outstanding exceptions since the evidence varied between reviewers.

Lack of Visibility into Cloud Services: There was no monitoring of cloud-hosted banking workloads, and therefore any control drift remained unnoticed.

Ongoing Control Shortcomings: Change management controls were missing, logical access reviews were inadequate, and there was no risk program for key third-party integrations.

The Solution

YASH replaced a manual compliance process driven by a spreadsheet with a controlled environment audited within a single platform. The scope of this project was defined with respect to the Trust Services Criteria in the areas of Security, Availability, and Confidentiality. We mapped the bank’s controls to an audited framework. We integrated all of its cloud and operational systems to collect evidence on an ongoing basis, rather than reconstructing it during the audit. In-house CPA auditors conducted the Type II observation period.

Engagement Highlights

Trust Services Criteria Scoping: Established the SOC 2 scope for the areas of Security, Availability, and Confidentiality, which were specific to digital banking and payment processing.
Evidence Automation Collection: Implemented the Thoropass audit lifecycle management software toolset that integrated with 100+ data sources from Azure, Azure AD, Jira, ServiceNow, HRIS systems, and banking APIs.
Control Design and Mapping: Identified and mapped 85+ controls against an approved control framework and referenced FFIEC and NIST CSF standards.
Real-Time Control Monitoring: Configured real-time dashboards with automatic drift detection and notifications on security access anomalies.
Vendor Risk Management: Consolidated the vendor risk management program with BAA and SLA management for integration partners.
Audit Execution with Closed-Loop Cycle: Completed a six-month Type II observation period with in-house CPA audit team members without using external providers.

Business Benefits

50%

Shorter audit timeline 14 months to 7 months

0

Exceptions on the SOC 2 Type II report

3x

Faster enterprise client onboarding

25%

Lower audit cost than the prior CPA engagement

85+

Controls mapped to FFIEC and NIST CSF

100+

Automated evidence integrations in place

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