Effective and Efficient

Now that Island is fully running at Live Oak, the benefits keep coming. Island has also proved itself to be surprisingly efficient. In a recent evaluation, Live Oak found that the resources needed to deploy, manage, and sustain the Island platform were 75% to 80% lower than anticipated.

Island has strengthened how Live Oak manages and governs employee use of AI tools. As part of the bank’s structured approach to innovation, employees have access to approved AI resources within clearly defined guardrails. Island supports this framework by enforcing granular data-protection policies at the browser level, ensuring that sensitive information remains safeguarded while employees leverage AI to enhance productivity. This allows Live Oak to encourage responsible innovation while maintaining its high standards for cybersecurity and regulatory compliance.

Island enabled Live Oak’s security team to bring modern identity and access controls to legacy banking systems, without re-architecting them. By seamlessly injecting unique credentials directly into each user’s browser session, the team elevated security standards behind the scenes while preserving a smooth, uninterrupted employee experience.

“With Island’s password manager, we're able to control access at the password and password-sharing levels,” Werbacher says. “From the standpoints of both access and security, that’s great.”

Island also helps Live Oak serve its customers quickly and securely, says Whitty Stephens, the bank’s loan-closing team manager. His team handles time-sensitive loan closings where every minute matters.

“Switching to another platform or system without waiting for an MFA [multifactor authentication] code—because Island's doing all that in the background—helps my team speed up the loan-closing process and just helps the customer even quicker,” Stephens says. “The time savings we have with Island help us to treat every customer like they're the only customer.”

Read more about Whitty Stephens’ experience using Island as an end user.

Another benefit for Live Oak is the breadth and depth of Island’s telemetry data, says Werbacher. “When we do security investigations—whether that is a suspected piece of malware or a potential phishing link—we’re actually able to see that activity at the browser level,” he says. “Previously, with other tools, we could only see it from the actual laptop traffic.”

The Island Future

With this successful start behind them, Live Oak’s security leaders now look forward to extending their partnership with Island. After starting with granular controls around data protection, Live Oak and Island have moved on to consolidating virtual desktop environments. 

“We’re excited about Island’s road map to extend their data-protection controls beyond the browser,” says Hatton.

Adds Werbacher: “When it comes to evaluating Island, expect to be blown away. It's a piece of technology we’ve wanted for a long time, and Island has absolutely delivered.”