Okta helps Western Union meet customers in the cloud

Mike Bartholomy: Western Union is a financial services company, mostly targeting under-banked and non-banked customers around the world. We're in every country but two, and we've got a worldwide network of about half a million agencies all helping people. "Move money for better" is our tagline so anyone that needs to send money or receive money can use our service to do so.

Several years ago when everything was on premise it was easy to kind of encapsulate a user's identity in that everything was within our four walls. But as our users move to the cloud more and more for the tools they need to get their jobs done we have to move the identity out there with them. That's been a big part, is knowing that the identity doesn't stop on premise. They are pieces of their identity spread throughout different cloud applications.

We evaluated Okta a lot more than we evaluated other solutions but we were definitely very happy with what we saw and compared to the other ... especially at the time the other pricing models and models of service offered by other vendors, it was a pretty easy decision. Within Western Union's IT landscape, Okta is a one-stop shop for all of the user's most critical web and cloud-based application. Western Union Okta is our most highly rating application. Reviews are rave from our user base. It makes us look really good, which is nice.

In Western Union some of the features we really like about Okta from an IT perspective are it's extremely easy to stand up. There's very little overhead needed. Provisioning and deprovisioning are a snap so this is first and foremost a security product for us. Yes, it gives the user a great experience, but it also gives us the assurance of knowing our user's access is cut off at the source because once they leave Western Union they can't get into Okta. They can't get into their applications.

We're starting to see more and more mobile adoption from users, and a big reason why is that Okta makes it easier for us to onboard new apps or onboard mobile access to apps that we already have throughout the enterprise. Mobile access to our HR system, mobile access to our travel system, mobile access to our CR system all in native apps is much easier to do now that users can just use us SSO to access those apps. Okta's very easy for us to administer. It only takes up a portion of our time and a big reason why is because Okta is always been very supportive as far as if we do have some issues helping us solve those issues quickly or bringing professional services or customer success teams to bear to help us find more creative ways to use the application or solve issues that maybe facing another areas of enterprise that we can use Okta to solve. I think that that's something good for potential customers and customers to know is that with Okta they're really getting a partner.