Case Studies

Customer Snapshot

This customer is a privately held financial services organization on the East Coast with about 800 employees and a network of 1,700 independent wealth advisors. The company has been recognized dozens of times on lists of “Best Places to Work,” and highly values the white glove treatment it provides to its advisor network. It recently spun off its proprietary software platform into a stand-alone technology company, which licenses the software to other companies.

Challenges

Like most other financial services institutions, this customer must comply with FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) along with other industry regulations.  A recent audit had shown that the company’s intensive manual processes were not compliant, and — given the company’s rapid growth — would soon be unsustainable. The company is known for treating its employees and advisors like “family,” assigning high level technical support representatives to personally resolve issues and ensure users have a frictionless experience. It was worried that introducing automated IAM systems that would replace some tech support functions might cause a degradation in responsiveness or user satisfaction. Additionally, the long-tenured employees in the IT group lacked knowledge about role-based IAM solutions, and the group had little experience doing strategic planning.

Solution

Integral Partners developed an IAM strategy and roadmap to meet the customer’s high standards for compliance and user satisfaction, while guiding the company toward improved risk management and efficiency as it scales.

From the project’s inception, Integral Partners, leveraging its expansive industry vertical experience, made the customer aware of potential improvements and efficiencies it hadn’t known existed. For example, though the company knew it needed to do a better job of managing access to shared files and data, it had not known the benefits of data access governance solutions until Integral Partners presented them. Integral Partners also shared with the customer ways it could use its existing access management tool to better handle the multitude of applications deployed across different departments.

Though motivated by an initial audit finding, the customer asked to change its roadmap in response to a second audit result. Integral Partners helped the company restructure its strategy to prioritize a privileged access management system, followed by an IGA system. To ensure the customer maintains its high-caliber service to its network of advisors, Integral Partners included on-boarding and process improvement recommendations for each new system the company implements.

Since the customer had hired a new CISO just prior to engaging advisory services, Integral Partners also provided the CISO with recommendations for building his IAM team: how to create the right roles, hire the right staff, and provide the right training. Integral Partners experts even met with the CISO’s new team between sessions at the Gartner IAM conference, white-boarding systems architecture and answering team members’ questions. This education, combined with the board’s approval of the IAM strategy and roadmap presented by Integral Partners, puts the CISO on target to help the company enact more secure, efficient solutions.