Funding Circle

Ayotunde Obasanya:  Funding Circle, essentially, is a marketplace. It's the world's leading global lender to SMEs, connecting businesses and investors, to be able to provide a SME loans. Our goal, our vision, is to build a better financial world to businesses and investors. Funding Circle has always had a cloud first strategy. Cloud allows us to essentially make sure we're able to deliver product much quicker, we're able to get the best productivity from both our employees and customers, it provides us the agility and security we need to be able to essentially transform our business.

So like we've seen over the last 10 years, the cloud has really taken off, and we believe that the trend has changed from having non-critical systems such as expense systems and visitor registration systems, to having critical workloads in the cloud, like HR systems and CRM. Before Okta our identity and access management, essentially, was active directory. And so we had on-premise active directory as a single identity for all our employees globally. What we started to see was, as we started to adopt more cloud and move from the traditional on-premise, we needed a way to be able to federate our identities across to all these multiple applications within the cloud. And that's where Okta came as the solution for us to be able to meet our business needs.

I think the greatest benefit we've seen with Okta is, first of all, our employees love it, because they don't have to remember several passwords to be able to gain access to our cloud based applications that live in Okta. And what that means for us is, we can ensure that every employee in the organisation has a single identity that's federated across, and gives them the flexibility, agility, as well as being able to even work remotely, and have one identity, and give them the access to the applications they need very quickly.

One example of how Okta has essentially transformed the way we deploy cloud applications is Slack. We use Slack for internal communications, and in the past it would have taken days or weeks to be able to deploy that across more than 600 users across the organisation, but with Okta we're able to deploy Slack to everyone in the organisation in seconds.

Security is very important to us as an organization, and with Okta you get the consistent policy and IT governance framework. As a clear example, you get multifactor authentication, which means that users have a second way of identifying who they are, and we have the flexibility of using different methods for the users, either via their mobile phones, either via push SMS notifications, via Google Authentication. They get to choose how they want to log in to the applications, in a secure fashion.

We continue to make sure we have a cloud first approach to our strategy, make sure that our employees continue to maintain a single identity, and make sure they are continue to be productive and agile. I think our business can go to bed at night and feel very, very comfortable that we have the right expertise and the right backend to support our applications delivery.