TL;DR
Manual identity execution is the work required after a policy decision is made but before an application account actually changes. In financial services, that work can accumulate across critical applications that lack SCIM or usable APIs. The cost appears in administration, delayed access, connector maintenance, licenses, access reviews, and evidence collection. A sound business case measures the workflow end to end and keeps product claims tied to validated application coverage.
Why are some of your financial institution’s most critical applications still outside standard authentication and access review processes?
Across a large application environment, those exceptions add up. They create operating cost, slow down access changes, and make it harder to confirm that an approved decision became the right state inside the application.
Most identity programs measure the controls they can see: SSO adoption, MFA coverage, access request volume, certification completion, or deprovisioning from connected applications. The harder work sits just outside those dashboards. It is the account creation completed from a ticket, the role updated by a local administrator, the shared credential rotated after someone leaves, and the screenshot collected for an access review.
Those tasks are easy to treat as exceptions. Across a large application estate, they become an operating model. Financial applications that do not support SAML, OIDC, SCIM, or user-management APIs still need the same identity outcomes as connected applications. The difference is that people, scripts, RPA, or general workflow tools bridge the last mile.
Manual execution is a system cost, not just an admin task
Cerby's 2025 Identity Automation Gap Report found that 96% of surveyed organizations had not fully automated their core identity tasks. The companion cost analysis estimates an average annual cost of $410,000 across audit and reporting drag, license waste, security risk exposure, productivity loss, and manual IT administration. These are research benchmarks, not a forecast for every institution. They help by making cost categories visible.
The 2026 Ponemon research adds a maintenance signal. Among the 52% of surveyed organizations using automation workarounds for disconnected apps, teams spent an average of 31.2 hours per week maintaining them. Again, that is a cross-industry average. A sound financial-services business case should replace it with observed local volumes, labor rates, rework, failure rates, and evidence effort.
Why the obvious workarounds hit a ceiling
Tickets can route responsibility, but they do not execute the change or continuously verify the target state.
Flat files can transport account and entitlement data, but they are snapshots that begin aging as soon as they are generated. Scripts can be effective when an application has a stable API, yet every script adds an owner, credential, error path, and maintenance obligation.
RPA and iPaaS can automate portions of the workflow. They are not, by default, identity governance systems. The technical question is whether the automation understands the identity object, policy decision, entitlement model, approval, target account, completion state, audit record, and remediation path. If those elements remain split across tools, the organization has accelerated a task without necessarily closing the control loop.
Durable automation needs identity context
The workflow should begin with the identity systems already trusted to make decisions. An HR, IdP, or IGA event establishes the person, requested access, role, approval, and timing. An execution layer then carries that instruction into the financial application. It should not invent a new policy or make an ambiguous decision on its own.
For disconnected applications, execution may use an API, a browser interface, or a thick-client interface.
The method matters less than the controls around it: secured administrative credentials, deterministic inputs, least-privilege operation, observable results, exception handling, and an audit trail that ties the action back to the approved identity event.
Application change is also part of the lifecycle. Interfaces, field names, and navigation can change without notice. Managed automation needs monitoring and drift handling so a workflow does not keep reporting success after the application has moved the control it was built to use.
How Cerby closes the execution gap
Cerby integrates with existing IAM and IGA platforms and extends their workflows to supported disconnected applications. It can use APIs where they exist and managed UI automation where they do not, including selected SaaS, legacy, on-premises, and homegrown applications. The platform can create and disable accounts, update roles and groups, rotate credentials, enforce supported MFA policies, and return access and completion data to the governance layer.
The financial-services solution brief also describes SSO-like launch from existing IdP dashboards, centralized credential controls, lifecycle automation, and audit visibility. These are capabilities to validate against the institution's specific applications and workflows. They should not be read as a blanket statement that every financial system is supported or that implementing the controls guarantees compliance.
Build the business case from the workflow up
Start with a representative set of applications and measure the work as it exists today. A simple baseline should include:
- Monthly joiner, mover, leaver, and access-review volume by application.
- Hands-on time, wait time, rework, and escalation time for each action.
- Maintenance time and failure recovery for scripts, bots, connectors, and files.
- Time to collect evidence and reconcile approved access with observed application state.
- License recovery, shared-account handling, and exception ownership.
- Implementation and ongoing operating cost for the proposed automation path.
Proof should stay attached to its source
Cerby's business value report cites up to 280% total ROI and more than 3,300 IT hours reclaimed annually for monday.com, up to 90% of identity workflows automated for Colgate-Palmolive, and 82% faster preparation for user access reviews for ClickUp. Those are named customer outcomes. They establish what has been achieved, not what every financial institution will achieve.
That distinction matters. The strongest case for automation is not a borrowed percentage. It is a measured workflow, a validated application set, and a control design that can show the difference between approval and completed execution.