Following the crisis in 2008, different industrial sectors has faced growing numbers of laws and regulations globally. The number and complexity of these regulations is creating significant issues for governance, risk and compliance management especially for heavily-regulated sectors, such as the financial industry. This paper proposes a semantically-enabled compliance management framework that backs up the entire business process compliance lifecycle, i.e., design-time verification, runtime and offline monitoring and analysis. In the heart of the framework is an integrated semantic repository incorporating domain, business and regulatory knowledge, at different levels of abstraction, which provides a shared conceptualization of the interrelated compliance and business specifics. Furthermore, given the technological revolution caused by cloud computing, we draw our vision on providing compliance-related ontologies as a service (COaaS) on the cloud. As an initial validation step, we have considered the financial sector with an Anti-Money Laundering (AML) case study and applied our semantic-based approach on.