In November, I had the chance to spend two days at MetricStream’s annual GRC Symposium in Las Vegas. Over the din of slot machines outside the doors, we heard from MetricStream’s leadership team, their clients and industry experts. For me the most interesting part of the conference came from a one-on-one conversation with MetricStream’s “new-ish” CEO, Marc Levine. Marc stepped into the role in March after a decade-long run at Moody’s Analytics, where he built and scaled their structured-finance product suite. What stood out in both his keynote and our discussion was his rigorous focus on customer centricity. Not as slide-ware —but as an operating model he’s already pushing through the organization. Here are three themes that emerged.

1. MetricStream’s Differentiation

One of his first actions as CEO was to go on a listening tour - visiting MetricStream's major clients. I asked Marc what he heard from them about the good and the bad of their experience with the product and what made MetricStream stand out from its competitors.

“First it is the richness of our featureset" Marc told me. MetricStream's 25 years in the field gives them an unusually deep functional footprint. Operating across 35 countries and regulatory regimes, they’ve built a platform designed around the specific needs of the R&C function.

Clients told him that MetricStream also stands out for the domain expertise that brings in collaborating with clients. This shows up for new clients during the POC phase of the sales process and for existing clients in their interactions with the services and customer success teams.

The final differentiator was the one I found most compelling. Marc said clients value their approach to AI. "The completeness of our AI vision gives clients confidence that it as a lever to make change", rather than something they have spray-painted across their product.

In his presentation, Raghuram Srinivas, Head of Product, shared their vision. Each of the six pieces of their GRC product—Risk, Compliance, Cyber, Resilience, Third-Party Risk, and Audit—gets its own task-specific agent designed to execute the “drudge-work none of us want to do”. The AI functionality he demonstrated passed the bar I have for what is truly Agentic AI: multi-step, proactive, adaptive, and autonomous.

2. New Skills as a New CEO

Marc was open about the fact that leading MetricStream requires learning an entirely different industry. While he brings many leadership skills that are directly transferable from his time at Moody’s, there is also a lot to learn and new capabilities to develop. Marc said the biggest shift was stepping into a market where he didn’t have a decade of expertise to lean on. “At Moody’s I had the benefit of two decades in structured finance” he told me. “Here, I’ve had to learn how to lead without that deep expertise.” He had to steep himself in the intricacies and details of the GRC market. There is also the newness of leading a private company, and the running of all the horizontal functions (finance, HR, IT infrascture, Legal) that he got to use as a business line within Moody’s.

3. Priorities

Finally we discussed his three top priorities for the next 12-18 months. All of which are focused on customer centricity. They stood out to me for the operationalization of each one. There are concrete steps and actions already in place to achieve each one of them. They are:

Priority 1: User-Driven Design

MetricStream has re-wired its development process so clients shape functionality at the very beginning of the cycle. Every product owner must meet with myriad clients to understand how a new feature will fit into their processes and solve their issues before building any meaningful feature. Early designs are now reviewed jointly with several customers, not revealed after the fact. This isn’t just “design thinking” theater. For a GRC vendor, the quality of forms, workflows, and evidence-collection processes defines the first-line experience. Getting those wrong sinks adoption.

Priority 2: New Functionality Faster

MetricStream is accelerating its release cycle. By using AI, and modifying the product development lifecycle, MetricStream is now releasing features faster than it ever has before. Furthermore, the ability to then custom-tailor those features in a manner that fits exactly into the client’s ways of working is a huge benefit. This can be done with both MetricStream’s significant GRC expertise and extensive partner network. These refinements may seem small, but it is where many GRC deployments struggle: the business hates the forms, so the project stalls. MetricStream is committed to making sure client adoption is high and business value is realized.

Priority 3: Faster Time to Value

Even the best roadmap doesn’t help if clients can’t absorb the changes. Marc described three initiatives: making upgrades dramatically easier, lowering the friction to configure and customize new modules, and expanding the remit of customer success to promote adoption inside the client organization, not just after go-live.

Time-to-value is emerging as the competitive battleground in GRC. This is where many vendors have stumbled, so it’s notable that Marc put it on his short list.

Finally, to signal all the changes underway, MetricStream just updated their branding. A new logo with a star and a new tagline that reflects a new emphasis on AI-enabled processes and client focus "“GRC Simplified. Outcomes Amplified."