If you’ve visited one of the world’s great old cities, chances are you didn’t do much digging for sewer lines, power cables, or water mains. If you did, you’d see that it’s a hot mess down there, with generations of different systems somehow patched together, yet somehow getting things done.

This was the situation a global financial services company found itself in with its customer identity and access management systems (CIAM). The company’s growth over the years had created a crazy quilt of different systems which, though working, were starting to affect the customer experience. To wit: its websites.

Each geography had its own site with its own account registration process and authentication technology; each looked different, and sometimes required different sets of credentials for different digital channels. Adding to the complexity: local regulations for managing customer profiles and preferences (hint: they were different).

The lack of website consistency was, in a word, onerous -- both to customers and company. With a cluster of patched-together inefficiencies like this, how could the company continue to build a global brand?

It was time to create a simple, secure, and unified experience -- not just to bring the customer experience up to snuff, or to meet risk management or compliance. No. An effective CIAM system could add value to the business, too. If the company’s business units shared access to customer information, then a customer could easily add a new policy without having to start an entirely new origination and underwriting process. And if different subsidiaries shared a single login and authentication system—instead of each building their own—they’d save both time and money. Win, win, win. And cue Deloitte.