Financial institutions are faced with a steady increase of regulations. In fact, with the upcoming of the financial crisis since 2007 and the Euro-crisis since 2010, there is a continuing trend to-wards increased regulation in this already highly regulated industry. In addition to legal regulations, banks are also ruled by many internal regulations, which prescribe the ways and means by which the daily operating business and hence business processes are to be executed. This progress makes the financial sector the most highly regulated industry.

Thus, business process compliance management is one of the most critical topics in financial institutions. The research problem of ProCom can be framed as the need to implement business process compliance (BPC) in an efficient (i.e., using as minimal resources as possible) and effective manner (i.e., addressing all regulations that apply to the business process landscape).

Therefore, the goal of ProCom was to develop an automatic business process compliance checking approach based on business process models and model query. Using such an approach, potential compliance violations of business processes can be identified quickly, and decision makers can be prompted in time. The compliance checking approach is generic, which means that it can be applied to process models created with arbitrary modeling languages. Furthermore, the way compliance rules are specified as inputs for the approach is generic as well making the approach transferable to related application areas such as business process improvement. After developing the approach and implementing it as a modeling tool prototype, we applied the approach in a real-world banking scenario and tested its effectiveness, its efficiency, its ease-of-use, and its business utility.