TP ICAP - Global finance achieves the ease and flexibility of cloud-based identity

Adrian Brown: My name is Adrian Brown. I work at TP ICAP, and my role is Head of QA for the Fusion program. TP ICAP is a global firm of professional intermediaries operating across the world's financial, energy, and commodities markets. ICAP was acquired at the end of last year by Tullet Prebon. The firm has presence in approximately 31 countries and has over 5000 employees. We're very much a tech company within TP ICAP. We definitely build services for our clients, we tailor them for our clients, and where possible if we have to we will take them off the shelf. We want to get products out to market quickly and efficiently, and we have to optimize all the way.

Adrian Brown: The previous IT infrastructure we had was pretty much data centers around the world, and it presented challenges where deploying software out to clients was very difficult. We failed, and we'd fail constantly. We then looked to see what Cloud services would help us, and Okta was one of the first ones, because we needed SSO, and we needed identity management to be in place.

Adrian Brown: We moved from an in house SSO arrangement where we described what we though SSO was. This wasn't fit for purpose. It wasn't enterprise scalable, and we needed to replace it. When we took customers off of this and migrated them into a real SSO solution our involvement with Okta started with the APIs. The first thing we did was get the APIs and started to use them immediately. We saw how simple it was and appreciated that we could get moving quickly. In no time we had proof of concept working with Okta. Then we realized how we could formulate a really viable project and product and we saw beyond what we have now as being a more federated model that we could offer out clients as well. We're now extending our reach with how we use identity management across other applications in the firm whether their development or not we enable as many applications as we possibly can because we see the benefits that having an application infrastructure like Okta in place gives us.

Adrian Brown: We leverage AWS for our Cloud infrastructure where we've pushed our entire fusion of state into the Cloud. Beyond this we've then enabled our applications for delivery to be Okta back whether they're Cloud or internal, they are now using the same SSO infrastructure that we provide for our existing fusion application. We have a wealth of applications under Okta at the moment. We use GitHub Enterprise, Ansible Tower, Slack. We're moving other applications in the development domain like Jira. We allow people to use their Slack applications on their mobile phone. It uses Okta. We control it. We monitor it and it fits into the ecosystem. We're moving Office 365 into Okta and this is an immanent change that we're about to go through and looking at further applications that go beyond development and productivity to also cover HR and other areas of the business. 

Adrian Brown: Leverage in the Cloud is very important to us. We have a way of working and we're gonna continue using this way of working as a patent. How we've operated with Okta is just going to move into other areas in the firm. The first thing that helped us with Okta, it had European presence and even better, the head office is coming to London when we started doing this work. It helped us get off the ground and speak to people that we needed to speak to and bring them in the offices and realize what our end goals were. Being engaged with customer success form the get go made things extremely easy. The experience of rolling out Okta was very simple. We went from a one week proof of concept immediately into development and within a few months we rolled out production. It was a smooth experience. Our customers were with us and they enjoyed the journey and the feedback was amazing. We've empowered ourselves and our customers to have agility with how they use the platform, how they get help, and how they self service. 

Adrian Brown: Now that we have Okta in place, the first thing that we feel will be onboard users is what a great experience. People say that instantly. They can't believe how easy it is to be onboarded into a company. They feel it. They see it happen and they can't believe that other financials haven't done this. Ideally our journey with Okta will move to a fully automated one where onboarding, application provisioning, everything becomes part of the experience. That's where we want to get to. The simplicity of using Okta across development all the way through to operations is very noticeable. The amount of time that people have to spend on Okta and understand it is minimal and they can service employees and clients equally. We've noticed it to be a highly available, reliable application. It provides us with something that we just need and it works, and it doesn't fail. 

Adrian Brown: With the new firm coming together this year we have new challenges, but we're very comfortable with managing that with Okta because we have the tools and the expertise and flexibility of what Okta provides. We can bring the firms together and integrate currently. We know that we can do this with out causing risk and cost to our customers and at the same time empower a greater experience to our internal staff and beyond.