Since 1921, Pekin Insurance has been providing its customers with the best possible service in some of the most difficult points in their lives. This philosophy is infused in Pekin Insurance’s Enterprise Security team. I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Ray Lewis, Director of Enterprise Security at Pekin Insurance, as he walked me through how the company is using identity to help deliver a secure yet pleasant experience to its employees and agents, with the experience soon to be offered to customers, as well.

Ray has been with Pekin Insurance since 2019. “I’ve been in the technology field for nearly 30 years and insurance for over six. Pekin Insurance is just simply one of the best companies I’ve worked for. It has a terrific culture–it’s very community-oriented and does a lot for the city of Pekin,” Ray said. “And everyone is working toward the same mission: We are all always trying to help people and insure people, even and especially, at some of the worst times in their lives.” Indeed, the company’s motto is Beyond the expected®, while offering financial protection for autos, homes, lives, and businesses in 22 states. In order to accomplish these goals, Pekin Insurance is leveraging identity to empower its 700+ employees and more than 7,000 agents.

Pekin Insurance began its Ping journey in 2020. The insurance carrier sells their insurance products through independent agents. Therefore, the company needed security and authentication solutions that support a positive digital experience for their B2B2C model. The company had successful SSO and MFA launches for its employees and quickly built upon that success with its agents. “The team wanted to enable MFA as smoothly as possible for our agents,” Ray explained. “The agents are independent and have a choice where they place their business therefore creating a frictionless experience, while improving security was top priority for us.”

Pekin Insurance selected Ping for a variety of reasons. Ping’s support for a hybrid environment suited the company’s needs, as some infrastructure is on-prem and some in the cloud. Ping was also selected by its industry leadership, as evidenced by Ping’s leadership position in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ as well as a conversation Pekin had with Gartner analysts. Additionally, Ray noted the power of the Ping platform by saying, “Ping also offered a solid solution that can work with all three of our identity types: employees, agents and eventually customers.”

The launch was highly successful for Pekin Insurance, one of the best in terms of speed of execution. The company intended to roll-out MFA in small pieces, but since the initial deployment went so well, they accelerated the overall deployment timeline. “The team was able to beat our timeline by months,” Ray said. The organization deployed MFA to more than 7,000 agents and employees in just over four months. One Pekin Insurance call-center representative was noted as saying they were shocked to learn the technology had deployed because there were very few calls coming through to them.

The deployment also scored extremely high in terms of customer satisfaction. Since deploying MFA, Pekin Insurance has reduced risk and strengthened its security posture with the least amount of friction as possible for its agents. Post-launch, an insurance agent told the company, “Your MFA is far easier to use than your competitor’s.”

Pekin Insurance is always looking for ways to improve the digital experience for its employees and agents. As such, the organization uses PingFederate so employees can securely access all applications they need from any device. This experience was replicated for its agents. Ray explained, “If you are trying to access the network remotely, you have to use MFA in order to reduce risk.” According to Ray, “PingOne Protect does the same thing for agents, determining unusual behavior, evaluating events and acting accordingly.” Ray added, “It uses the underlying technology to determine things like, ‘are they coming from a different place, a different number, etc.’ If something is unusual, they would be prompted to use MFA.” This results in a much more pleasant experience as the system will recognize the device, geo, etc. and not enforce numerous and unnecessary MFAs for agents.

Ray is a true technologist and is always looking for ways to improve the security posture for Pekin Insurance and its agents while also removing as much inconvenience as possible. Ray said, “I love technology and change. Four years ago, people told us we couldn’t use MFA for agents, and we said, ‘oh yes we can, and we did’.”

Ray and his team are always looking into future innovations like “passwordless” that continue to make life easier and more secure for its employees, agents, and customers. As a company that is focused on pursuing technologies to make things easier and more secure for its users, we can’t wait to see what Pekin Insurance does next.