From 2-Day Ordeals to 90-Minute Runs: How a Tokyo Fintech Overhauled Access Certification with Zluri

Discover how a Tokyo-based regulated fintech transformed its access certification process with Zluri, reducing certification setup time from 16 hours to just 90 minutes and consolidating 95 individual campaigns into 21 grouped runs. With automated audit reporting, Jira-native remediation, and improved visibility into orphaned access, the company streamlined compliance, reclaimed over $51K in licenses, and generated an estimated $100K+ in ROI.

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About the Customer

The customer is a regulated financial technology company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, operating in the Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) segment. Like most regulated fintechs, they face a dual mandate: keep the business moving fast while maintaining the access governance posture that regulators and auditors expect. IT operations are managed by a lean team - the IT Tech Lead and the IT Systems Engineer - responsible for provisioning, identity lifecycle, and the semi-annual access certification cycles that the company's compliance obligations require. Before Zluri, those certification cycles were the team's most painful recurring obligation.

The Problem: 

Access Reviews as a Manual Ordeal

Every six months, the team had to certify access across approximately 95 applications, individually. Each certification campaign covered a single app, meaning one setup per app, repeated nearly a hundred times per cycle.

The IT Systems Engineer describes what that setup actually looked like:

"I really remember copy, copy, pasting all the titles, assigning the assignee for every
single application. Then you had prod, staging for the databases... it took so much time just setting up one single app."

Each certification took close to two full working days (~16 hours) to configure. Multiply that across 95 apps and the semi-annual access review cycle consumed an enormous share of the team's capacity, before a single reviewer had even looked at a single account.

Audit Evidence Meant Weeks in Spreadsheets

Beyond the setup burden, audit evidence was a spreadsheet problem. Reporting required reactive effort after certifications closed: collating data, formatting exports, chasing approvals.

Orphaned Access: Invisible by Default

Unused and orphaned accounts, seats held by former employees or inactive users, had no systematic detection mechanism. The team could not easily know which accounts to prioritize for revocation, and consolidating that information required manual effort across multiple systems.

How Zluri Changed the Process

Grouped Campaigns: 95 Apps Became 21 Runs

Zluri's UAR module allowed the team to consolidate individual application certifications into grouped campaigns, bundling up to 15 applications per campaign. What previously required ~95 separate campaigns per cycle now runs as ~21 grouped ones.

The structural change alone reduced the volume of certification events by over 75%. But the bigger change was in setup time.

Setup Time: 16 Hours to 90 Minutes

With pre-configured reviewer assignments, global remediation settings, and dynamic variables that auto-populate application details, The IT Systems Engineer can now stand up a certification in minutes rather than days:

"Now I just start a new certification, give it a name, put all apps with the delegate reviewer as a custom field, we have it prefab, right? Once set up and forget, click through it, put a date on it, put the remediations to global ones on it and it's done. So it takes me like five minutes to set up a new review nowadays. "

The 91% reduction in per-certification time, from ~16 hours to ~1.5 hours, is the single most impactful operational change the team has experienced with Zluri.

Jira-Native Remediation

Once a reviewer completes a certification and marks an account for revocation, the remediation workflow flows directly into Jira. App name, reviewer information, and comments pass through dynamic variables into Jira tickets automatically, with no manual handoff or copy-pasting between systems. This was a natural fit for the team's existing engineering workflow and removed the last manual step from the end-to-end process.

Auto-Generated Audit Reports

Audit evidence is now produced automatically at the close of each certification: a non-editable PDF with a complete approval and revocation audit trail. What previously required weeks of spreadsheet assembly is now ready at the click of a button: compliant, timestamped, and immutable. For a company operating under regulatory audit obligations, this shift from reactive reporting to built-in evidence generation is a qualitative compliance improvement that the numbers alone don't fully capture.

675 Revocations: Orphaned Access Finally Visible

Across 78 certifications completed to date, Zluri has facilitated 675 access revocations, accounts that would previously have persisted invisibly. At an average license cost of $151, the license reclamation value from these revocations alone is estimated at $51,038 (¥7.65M).

Results: Before vs. After

Zluri Metrics Table
Metric Before Zluri After Zluri
Setup time per certification ~16 hrs (2 full days) ~1.5 hrs
Certifications (semi-annual) ~95 individual campaigns (1 app per campaign) ~21 grouped campaigns (Up to 15 apps per campaign)
Audit evidence & reporting Weeks of Excel effort Auto-generated non-editable PDF (Full approval/revocation trail)
Orphaned & unused access No visibility (Manual tracking only) 675 revocations facilitated

Return on Investment

The ROI generated through Zluri's UAR module (across IT admin time, reviewer efficiency, audit prep, and license reclamation) is estimated at over $100,000 for 78 certifications. Break-even was reached within approximately three months.

ROI Table
ROI Category USD JPY (¥150/USD)
IT Admin Labor Savings
1,131 hrs × $40/hr
$45,240 ¥6.8M
Reviewer Efficiency Gain
Context-switch reduction @ $65/hr
$12,000+ ¥1.8M+
Audit Prep Savings
90% efficiency improvement
$15,000+ ¥2.25M+
License Reclamation
338 licenses × avg $151/license
$51,038 ¥7.65M
TOTAL ESTIMATED ROI $100,515+ ¥15.1M+
Tokyo Fintech Overhauled Access Certification
Ben Tibi, Head of IT at Guesty
"We've gotten to the point where we no longer look at Zluri as this fascinating tool with all these bells and whistles and look at it more as day-to-day commonplace. And I think that's exactly where the tool should fit.”
The IT Tech Lead,on where Zluri now sits in the team's workflow

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Case studies
From 2-Day Ordeals to 90-Minute Runs: How a Tokyo Fintech Overhauled Access Certification with Zluri

Discover how a Tokyo-based regulated fintech transformed its access certification process with Zluri, reducing certification setup time from 16 hours to just 90 minutes and consolidating 95 individual campaigns into 21 grouped runs. With automated audit reporting, Jira-native remediation, and improved visibility into orphaned access, the company streamlined compliance, reclaimed over $51K in licenses, and generated an estimated $100K+ in ROI.

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About the Customer

The customer is a regulated financial technology company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, operating in the Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) segment. Like most regulated fintechs, they face a dual mandate: keep the business moving fast while maintaining the access governance posture that regulators and auditors expect. IT operations are managed by a lean team - the IT Tech Lead and the IT Systems Engineer - responsible for provisioning, identity lifecycle, and the semi-annual access certification cycles that the company's compliance obligations require. Before Zluri, those certification cycles were the team's most painful recurring obligation.

The Problem: 

Access Reviews as a Manual Ordeal

Every six months, the team had to certify access across approximately 95 applications, individually. Each certification campaign covered a single app, meaning one setup per app, repeated nearly a hundred times per cycle.

The IT Systems Engineer describes what that setup actually looked like:

"I really remember copy, copy, pasting all the titles, assigning the assignee for every
single application. Then you had prod, staging for the databases... it took so much time just setting up one single app."

Each certification took close to two full working days (~16 hours) to configure. Multiply that across 95 apps and the semi-annual access review cycle consumed an enormous share of the team's capacity, before a single reviewer had even looked at a single account.

Audit Evidence Meant Weeks in Spreadsheets

Beyond the setup burden, audit evidence was a spreadsheet problem. Reporting required reactive effort after certifications closed: collating data, formatting exports, chasing approvals.

Orphaned Access: Invisible by Default

Unused and orphaned accounts, seats held by former employees or inactive users, had no systematic detection mechanism. The team could not easily know which accounts to prioritize for revocation, and consolidating that information required manual effort across multiple systems.

How Zluri Changed the Process

Grouped Campaigns: 95 Apps Became 21 Runs

Zluri's UAR module allowed the team to consolidate individual application certifications into grouped campaigns, bundling up to 15 applications per campaign. What previously required ~95 separate campaigns per cycle now runs as ~21 grouped ones.

The structural change alone reduced the volume of certification events by over 75%. But the bigger change was in setup time.

Setup Time: 16 Hours to 90 Minutes

With pre-configured reviewer assignments, global remediation settings, and dynamic variables that auto-populate application details, The IT Systems Engineer can now stand up a certification in minutes rather than days:

"Now I just start a new certification, give it a name, put all apps with the delegate reviewer as a custom field, we have it prefab, right? Once set up and forget, click through it, put a date on it, put the remediations to global ones on it and it's done. So it takes me like five minutes to set up a new review nowadays. "

The 91% reduction in per-certification time, from ~16 hours to ~1.5 hours, is the single most impactful operational change the team has experienced with Zluri.

Jira-Native Remediation

Once a reviewer completes a certification and marks an account for revocation, the remediation workflow flows directly into Jira. App name, reviewer information, and comments pass through dynamic variables into Jira tickets automatically, with no manual handoff or copy-pasting between systems. This was a natural fit for the team's existing engineering workflow and removed the last manual step from the end-to-end process.

Auto-Generated Audit Reports

Audit evidence is now produced automatically at the close of each certification: a non-editable PDF with a complete approval and revocation audit trail. What previously required weeks of spreadsheet assembly is now ready at the click of a button: compliant, timestamped, and immutable. For a company operating under regulatory audit obligations, this shift from reactive reporting to built-in evidence generation is a qualitative compliance improvement that the numbers alone don't fully capture.

675 Revocations: Orphaned Access Finally Visible

Across 78 certifications completed to date, Zluri has facilitated 675 access revocations, accounts that would previously have persisted invisibly. At an average license cost of $151, the license reclamation value from these revocations alone is estimated at $51,038 (¥7.65M).

Results: Before vs. After

Zluri Metrics Table
Metric Before Zluri After Zluri
Setup time per certification ~16 hrs (2 full days) ~1.5 hrs
Certifications (semi-annual) ~95 individual campaigns (1 app per campaign) ~21 grouped campaigns (Up to 15 apps per campaign)
Audit evidence & reporting Weeks of Excel effort Auto-generated non-editable PDF (Full approval/revocation trail)
Orphaned & unused access No visibility (Manual tracking only) 675 revocations facilitated

Return on Investment

The ROI generated through Zluri's UAR module (across IT admin time, reviewer efficiency, audit prep, and license reclamation) is estimated at over $100,000 for 78 certifications. Break-even was reached within approximately three months.

ROI Table
ROI Category USD JPY (¥150/USD)
IT Admin Labor Savings
1,131 hrs × $40/hr
$45,240 ¥6.8M
Reviewer Efficiency Gain
Context-switch reduction @ $65/hr
$12,000+ ¥1.8M+
Audit Prep Savings
90% efficiency improvement
$15,000+ ¥2.25M+
License Reclamation
338 licenses × avg $151/license
$51,038 ¥7.65M
TOTAL ESTIMATED ROI $100,515+ ¥15.1M+
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