SAM — Secure Access Management

SAM is S&P Global's unified customer identity platform. Okta provides authentication: single sign-on, MFA, federation, and the OAuth, OIDC, and SAML flows. Paired with it is a custom-built authorization and entitlements layer covering licensing, product packaging, provisioning, and entitlement propagation. That hybrid architecture is the differentiator, because off-the-shelf identity gets you login, not the entitlement complexity of a financial-data business.

The platform serves roughly 4 million users and a 42,000-license estate across 150+ product lines, in a regulated environment, at 99.5%+ uptime. I lead the product organization behind it: 22 people across three global teams, influencing over $2B in revenue.

When I took the platform on, entitlements and account data were spread across more than six disconnected legacy systems. Consolidating them into SAM avoided over $15M in long-term cost and gave the company one source of truth for who can access what.

The integration model changed too. Bespoke one-off builds were replaced with API-first patterns and published standards across 30+ business lines, cutting integration time five-fold, which works out to roughly four months saved per migration. Self-serve provisioning workflows cut customer onboarding time by 80%.

None of the 30+ business lines report to me. Standards spread because we published the trade-offs, showing what each team would gain and give up by adopting them, instead of mandating compliance. Teams could see the case and make the decision their own, which is the only kind of adoption that sticks.

I also own the Okta vendor relationship: configuration standards, upgrade planning, keeping bespoke customization to a minimum, and pushing our requirements into their roadmap through their solution engineers.

Distributed caching, asynchronous workflows, and precision rate limiting tripled authentication performance while cutting cloud spend by 25%.

The platform's APIs also sit inside Customer Care's own triaging system, so support agents resolve access issues without leaving their queue. We built that directly with the Care and Delivery teams to automate entitlements fulfilment and troubleshooting, rather than asking them to come to us.