A West Coast credit union deployed Avatier's Password Station in six weeks, reducing service desk ticket volume by 15% in just eight months and achieving six-figure cost savings in under a year.
Founded in October of 1940, Kinecta Credit Union (formerly the Hughes Aircraft Employees Credit Union) has been serving its member-owners for over 70 years. 275,000 members strong and growing, Kinecta has turned into a leader in the financial services industry. In response to that growth, Kinecta personnel are constantly looking for ways to increase efficiency. Like many financial institutions, Kinecta also faces the need to abide by increasingly-strict government regulations regarding the protection of sensitive identity information. In order to take the first steps towards reducing time and resources spent performing Windows password resets, Kirun Amiri, the Director of IT Service Delivery, took a trusted colleague’s suggestion to check out Avatier. After several years of consideration, she was able to acquire approval to bring in Avatier’s Password Station module. Once they started the process, implementation was completed in approximately six weeks. The results were quickly apparent. Eight months later, service desk ticket volume has been reduced by approximately 15%, and the savings have already matched the annual expectation. Furthermore, Ms. Amiri knows that Password Station’s implementation will open the door to further integration of Avatier products.
Avatier represents a six-figure savings per year.
The first step towards streamlining their system was to integrate Avatier’s Password Station into their two separate Active Directory environments. This challenge was accomplished with customizations that did not significantly slow the implementation timeline. Ms. Amiri noticed that Password Station has made a big difference: “Avatier represents a six-figure savings per year. I pulled a report a day ago to see how we’re doing with our commitment to our business case. Even though it hasn’t been a full year of using this business tool, we’ve already met our savings goal using this tool.” There’s more work to be done in the future, as Ms. Amiri knows. “Once we set up this Active Directory hook and got started with Avatier, we planned to dive into an identity and access management solution over time.” That timeline may be sped up by new legislation requirements for banks to increase security measures to protect their customers from cyber attacks. Fortunately, any new regulations that are established can be satisfied by the many tools such as MFA Biometrics that are available from Avatier, whose products exceed military-standard security protocols. When the go-ahead was given to find a solution to streamline password resets in Kinecta’s Active Directory environment, Ms. Amiri settled on Avatier in large part due to its robust features that surpass what the competition can offer. “In terms of feature set, having a phone reset was definitely appealing to us,” she explains. “We definitely focused on that. In terms of the credential provider, that was something that was available from several vendors, but the admin GUI and the configuration on the admin side with Avatier were a lot more friendly to us.” In addition to the immediate benefits of implementing Avatier, Ms. Amiri recognized that there is potential for the future. “The product works. It really does help create efficiencies within any company. Any time you empower your users or your employees to service themselves, that’s always a good thing.”