Raising the bar on Conflict of Interest 
management: CoreStream GRC’s high quality 
implementation services success story   

Everyone’s heard the horror stories of GRC implementations that drag on for months, sometimes years, with personnel moving in and out as people leave before the project is done. It’s no wonder risk and compliance teams cling to the devil they know. The fear of scope creep, decision paralysis, slipping timelines, and sheer team fatigue is enough to make anyone stick with clunky, outdated tooling.  

We get it. And we think it’s time to challenge that expectation.  

CoreStream GRC was built to break this cycle. Our platform is deliberately flexible and inherently scalable, so designing your solution feels more like building with LEGO bricks than wrestling rigid modules into place. No forced workarounds. No dead ends. No painful upgrades.  

This success story shows what a smooth, collaborative, and genuinely enjoyable implementation can look like, this time with a global brand.  

Because there is a better way.  
The CoreStream GRC way.  

Client profile snapshot    

• Organization type:  high volume of conflict-of-interest touchpoints across legal, IT, and investment-related activity   

• Program reality: Disclosures for new hires within 7 days, plus an annual disclosure campaign that aims for 100% completion    

• Team model: A program manager coordinating between legal SMEs and IT partners    

• Core need: A conflict-of-interest (COI) solution that could match the pace of the organization, while producing clean, defensible proof of what happened, when, and why   

The challenge: a legacy system “made to fit” compliance, not built for it  

The not-for-profit’s previous legacy software was not designed for compliance. Over time, it had been customized heavily to fit the organization’s conflict-of-interest process, and that created the classic knock-on effects: workarounds, admin complexity, and fragility.  

The Program Manager put it to us plainly;   

“The tool was not really built for purpose, we took and sort of made [it] to fit our compliance process but was not intended to be a compliance tool… it’s incredibly difficult to figure out. It wasn’t cleanly designed for the purpose for which we use it.”    

That pain showed up in a few very specific ways:  

• Reporting became reconstruction focused. Data needed to be pulled into Excel, manipulated manually, and sometimes rebuilt in Power BI just to understand what was happening:  
  “It was very manual.”  

• Annual disclosure season became an endurance event. Reporting cadence ramped from a few times a week to daily and then twice daily.  

• IT dependency for basic program tasks. Even simple actions like campaign emails required IT involvement.  

This is what compliance debt looks like in real life. You can get through it, but you pay for it constantly in time and bottlenecks.  

  

The selection: the GRC “unicorn” in a market full of trade-offs  

  When they went to market, they were not looking for another system they would have to rebuild into shape. They were explicitly trying to get away from heavy manual effort, because they had already lived the downstream cost of that.   

They had identified four key areas which they would prioritize:   

1. risk coverage  

2. scalability  

3. automation  

4. implementation speed (a bonus, but important)  

That is where CoreStream GRC stood out.  

Internally, the team called it their “unicorn”, because it was the only solution they evaluated that met all their criteria at once:  

“CoreStream GRC stood out immediately. Internally, we referred to it as our ‘unicorn’ because it was the only solution we evaluated that met all of our criteria. While other vendors met some requirements, none were able to deliver the same combination of out of the box functionality, flexibility, and ease of use that CoreStream GRC provided.”  

They also called out the sales experience as a confidence-builder, not a handoff:  

“The sales experience was fantastic… consistently collaborative, knowledgeable, and deeply familiar with the platform… flexible in accommodating additional conversations so that all members of our team felt confident before moving into the contracting phase.”  

The differentiator: in-person implementation services that aligned cultures and moved fast  

The NFP team asked for on-site design sessions because they had done something similar in early 2025 with another technology implementation and saw the impact. In their words, it “sped the process up in a great way.” They wanted that same momentum here.  

CoreStream GRC agreed, and the goals were set:  

• speed through the design process  

• collaboration and rapport  

• shared vocabulary and shared understanding  

• helping the implementation team “get a sense of who we are” as an organization   

“It’s an opportunity to build really great rapport, a shared understanding, shared vocabulary… and they get a sense of who we are as an organization by spending time with us on site.”  

The NFP had already done their own prep work, including a discovery project where requirements were mapped out in detail. Sharing that in advance meant the CoreStream GRC could study it and show up ready to work.  

“All of the kudos really goes to the CoreStream GRC team, you all showed up so well… having a good solid understanding of where we were coming from.”  

In other words, the CoreStream GRC team showed up already oriented, asked the right questions, and helped them distinguish what needed to be decided now versus what could remain flexible later.  

The client described the on-site work as genuinely effective, especially because the solution they need is “inherently complex,” and every organization’s approach is personal. In-person sessions helped them work through “brain-bending concepts” and real use cases in a way that would have been slower and messier over calls.   

And importantly, it was not a passive “tell us what you want and we’ll build it” approach.  

This organization did not want to replicate a heavily custom legacy setup, however they did want it to flex to their needs. They wanted to understand where best practice should lead, and only go custom where it was genuinely non-negotiable. 

“There were definitely moments where we were challenged or encouraged to think differently and I think that was very welcome. Because again, we didn’t want… something wholly custom to us. We wanted to understand… where this is industry best practice.”  

“And there have been some places where we’ve been like, this is really important to us… and CoreStream GRC has been really flexible and accommodating.”  

That is the sweet spot where CoreStream GRC sits in the market: best practice systems, designed with experts and shaped by real client programs, while still respecting the parts of an operating model that are specific for good reason.   

What they’re building now: a conflict-of-interest operating model that scales  

Even mid-implementation, the “after” picture is already clear.  

1) Risk-based checking, with more confidence in the outputs  

This organization check every investment or transaction and review potential conflicts through legal SMEs. Historically, they took a deliberately broad approach to make sure nothing was missed.  

With CoreStream GRC, they’re moving toward a more risk-based scope while maintaining full coverage, driven by greater confidence in the system’s support and results.  

2) Tailored disclosure experience through smarter workflows  

A major improvement is the ability to tailor question sets based on entity and role, rather than forcing everyone through the same overly thorough questionnaire.  

These personalized branch-logic pieces are where the “intuitive experience” shows up in practice: collecting the right data, at the right depth, from the right people.  

3) Less manual admin, less IT dependency  

One of the biggest day-to-day wins  is simply being able to run the conflict-of-interest program without needing to pull IT in for basic operational tasks.  

In the current setup, the legal team administer the tool and run the program, but certain “simple” actions still require technical support.   

With CoreStream GRC, the expectation is more direct, hands-on administration by the legal team, so they can run campaigns and program tasks without waiting on technical colleagues. That matters because during disclosure season, reporting and follow-up cadence ramps quickly, and the faster the team can act, the easier it is to hit 100% completion without turning the month into an endurance event.  

The measurable GRC win: 500 - 700 hours saved annually 

This organization had quantified the manual load through their discovery work:  

“The team of 3 legal SMEs were spending 500 to 700 hours annually… doing manual processes around this program.”  

In practical terms, that meant Subject Matter Experts rotating ownership of conflict checking:  

“That’s their entire week worth of work… pretty much 40 hours… and all of the rest of their responsibility then falls until they can pick it up.”  

The goal is not just “efficiency.” It’s freeing highly skilled legal experts to do work that actually requires judgment, not admin.  

The difference in the CoreStream GRC’s approach: a challenger to the market.  

The brand chose CoreStream GRC because it was the only player that met every requirement at once. Internally, they called it their “unicorn.” But what made this a success story was the implementation: in-person design sessions, culture alignment, and a delivery team that pushed toward best practice while respecting the things that truly had to stay their way.  

This project is a good reminder of what our industry should demand from GRC solutions: not just features in a demo, but a platform that scales without rebuilding, reporting you can trust without reconstruction, and an implementation team that shows up sharp, aligns with your culture, and pushes you toward best practice without ignoring what you truly need.   

The result is simple: less admin, more confidence, and hundreds of hours back every year.  

If you want to see what that looks like in your environment:   

FAQ on Conflict of Interest management