Compliance-Driven Incident-to-Release Governance for Customer Due Diligence Operations in Regulated Banking Systems

Know Your Customer (KYC) operations in large regulated banks depend on fragmented incident management, ad hoc root cause analysis, and loosely coupled release governance, producing weak audit traceability and elevated compliance exposure. Existing operational models treat incident triage, defect remediation, and release approval as disconnected activities owned by separate functions, which delays remediation of client identification and risk-data defects and weakens evidentiary continuity for regulatory examination. This article proposes an integrated Incident-Problem-Release Traceability (IPRT) framework that unifies ITIL-aligned incident and problem management with structured requirements traceability, controlled release governance, and quality-gated testing evidence. The framework formalizes a closed-loop pipeline connecting production triage, SME-driven root cause analysis, risk-weighted prioritization, System Integration Testing and User Acceptance Testing evidence capture, and release sign-off, with every artifact linked through a persistent traceability key. A case-based evaluation across twelve production remediation cycles in a customer due diligence environment compared the IPRT framework against a conventional siloed baseline. Results show a 41 percent reduction in mean incident-to-remediation cycle time, a 33 percent improvement in audit-evidence completeness, and a statistically significant reduction in repeat incident recurrence (p