Managing Risk: MetricStream Chairman Gunjan Sinha (Part 6)

Sramana: What impact did your aggressive marketing campaign have on your company and your marketplace?

Gunjan Sinha: The market shifted from being in an early evangelical phase to something that had broad-based adoption. Customers stopped thinking of it as something that was nice to have and started thinking of it as something they had to have.

Sramana: Would you shed some light on how the financial services sector has adopted your solution? What kind of risk mitigation can MetricStream provide to those companies?

Gunjan Sinha: Our focus at MetricStream is to go after the most regulated verticals, which are industries like financial services, energy and utilities, life sciences, and healthcare. Financial services has a tremendous need for our technology. Companies like UBS and Citibank are our customers. They need the correct best practices to solve their overall GRC problems and ensure there are adequate controls, risk mitigation strategies, and audits in place to be able to manage their business more effectively. The financial services industry is making those investments now.

Sramana: MetricStream offers a platform, but obviously there needs to be policy on top of that platform. What is your assessment of financial services industry action in this regard? An example could be mortgage-backed securities, where there were clearly groups of people taking inappropriate risks.

Gunjan Sinha: It is not as though people are always trying to beat the system; sometimes it is lack of visibility on what is really happening. We use technology to increase visibility. That results in risk-aware intelligence. You can see where your risks are, and you can set parameters and controls for specific metrics. You are automatically alerted when you exceed a certain risk profile. That leads to risk-aware, intelligent decision making across the entire enterprise.

Just because the euro is down right now, a bank does not need to go negative in their euro positions. If the euro springs back two years later, there would be consequences to that. We enable entities to look at the counter side of every argument. Just because something is working well, you don’t want to go overboard. We help you put processes in place to control risk, define it for your enterprise, and understand the underlying factors that influence these controls. When controls are violated, we help identify the remedial actions to take and how to implement them. We help manage losses and potential losses. Our technology enables thousands of people globally to manage these problems. In the past this was done in an ad-hoc fashion through emails, spreadsheets, and phone calls. There was not a central system to help companies gain visibility. When you learn about it too late, the damage has already been done.

You have to put probes in your enterprise and capture key metrics. That is why we named the company MetricStream. The idea is to stream metrics from various areas of the company so you can get the indications from your key performance or risk indicators and then make an intelligent decision in a risk-aware manner.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Managing Risk: MetricStream Chairman Gunjan Sinha
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