American Financial Services Association (AFSA) is a trade association for the U.S. consumer credit industry headquartered in Washington, DC. AFSA’s 450 members include consumer and commercial finance companies, vehicle finance/leasing companies, mortgage lenders, credit card issuers, industrial banks, and industry suppliers. AFSA provides the consumer credit industry and the consumers it services with a voice in Washington, D.C. and access to the media and investment community. AFSA also provides policy advice and issues management at both the federal and state level.

The Challenge

AFSA experienced a security breach, which impacted its ability to recover data and effectively serve its members. Unable to address this breach to the organization’s satisfaction, AFSA’s leadership lost confidence in its IT provider. AFSA needed a trusted partner to deliver services that aligned with the organization’s goals of data security, business continuity, and leveraging modern technology to ensure staff remained productive and served the organization’s mission. 

The Solution

FSi Strategies (FSi) quickly developed a technology improvement plan (TIP) for AFSA, completing several key projects on an aggressive timeline. These projects included FSi migrating AFSA from Microsoft Exchange to Office 365 to improve reliability, security, and control, transitioning files to Sharepoint and OneDrive to improve AFSA workflows and enable teams with cloud-accessible file sharing, and migrating AFSA to Microsoft Azure AD services to streamline processing, increase productivity, and improve security.

After upgrading AFSA to Microsoft’s cloud platform, FSi transitioned AFSA to its ongoing managed IT services to address the organization’s need for:
• more timely and reliable end-user support;
• proactive system monitoring and management; and
• continuous strategic planning.

The Results

FSi Strategies delivered a comprehensive technology solution leveraging cloud-based services from Microsoft and industry best practices to successfully address AFSA’s immediate need to secure data, make business continuity a reality, and begin a move towards a modern workplace environment. By wrapping FSi’s core managed IT services with leading technologies from Microsoft, AFSA has been able to provide reliable IT support, increase staff mobility, improve team collaboration, provide a secure work environment, deliver better business insights, and increase staff productivity.

“FSi Strategies quickly assessed our IT environment and successfully migrated us away from our virtual desktop (VDI) environment to a more secure Microsoft Cloud solution that promoted mobility, collaboration, and productivity. FSI met our aggressive schedule requirements and we have been extremely satisfied with our client experience with FSi from cloud migration to the ongoing IT managed service”                                        

 – Dan Bucherer, AFSA