Access Financial Services Limited 

Overview

Access Financial Services Limited was established in 2000 and listed on the Junior Market of the Jamaica Stock Exchange in 2009.  Access is one of the premier providers of loans to Jamaica’s Microfinance Sector. Access provides both personal and business loans island-wide through a retail network of seventeen (17) branches. The company’s head office is located at 41B Half-Way-Tree Road, Kingston 5.

Since its inception, Access has disbursed more than J$9 billion in loans. The company contributes significantly to the Microfinance Sector, the development of which is essential to job creation and economic growth. The company’s micro-business clients operate in all major sectors of the economy, including Service, Manufacturing, Trading, and Agriculture.

Problem

Access Financial Services outlined the need for the solution to meet the following business requirements:

• Increase business efficiency through IT optimization and standardization
• Improved end to end network security facilitating secure communications across the wide-area network
• Implement a scalable solution allowing the organization to grow organically without having to fully replace any components to add additional staff or computing systems
• Structured network for ease of management through a single pane of glass
• Implement an IT infrastructure that supports all functionality required to achieve industry compliance (such as PCI DSS)
• Reducing communication network operating costs

Solution

• Broad visibility and protection across the network with real-time visibility across all devices and applications.
• Integrated detection and response to advanced threats by streamlining communications among the different security solutions, thus shrinking detection and remediation timelines.
• Automated operation and analytics through a single pane of glass facilitating coordinated automated response and resolution to threats detected anywhere across your extended network.
• Network redundancy, higher capacity WAN bandwidth, and the use of multiple WAN connection types through SD-WAN technology

Benefits

• Enabling remote sites to securely access cloud services without the need to backhaul traffic through the Head Office Internet connecting using SD-WAN technology
• Reducing networking operating costs by substituting expensive site to site VPN circuits with cheaper Internet services to interconnect remote sites using SD-WAN technology