How FocalPoint moved its whole company onto Slate securely

The challenge

In fintech, how you work is part of what you sell. FocalPoint's customers trust it with their money and their data, and that trust has to hold up under audit.

So when the company looked at adopting a single workspace, the bar was different from most. It wasn't enough for a tool to be fast or well designed. It had to satisfy a security team that usually says no for a living.

For a long time that bar kept the company fragmented. Sensitive work was scattered because no tool met the requirements, and the teams handling the most regulated information were the most siloed of all. Every audit meant weeks of assembling evidence from a dozen disconnected places.

We could not put our work in a tool that our own compliance team would not sign off on. That ruled out almost everything we looked at.

Jason Park - Head of Security, FocalPoint

The result was a company that moved more slowly than it wanted to, not because the people were slow, but because the tools they were allowed to use didn't connect.

Why Slate

FocalPoint moved to Slate because it was the first workspace that cleared the security bar without asking the company to lower it.

Slate was the first tool where the security story was as serious as the product itself. Our compliance team approved it on the first review.

That first-review approval was close to unheard of. SSO and SAML meant access tied straight into FocalPoint's existing identity provider. Role based access meant the right people saw the right things and no more. And audit logs meant every meaningful action was recorded, exportable, and ready long before anyone came asking.

For the first time, the most regulated teams in the company could work in the same place as everyone else, without anyone in security losing sleep over it.

How they use it

Today FocalPoint runs sensitive and everyday work side by side in Slate, with the controls to keep them properly separated.

Access is governed by role, so engineering, finance, and compliance each operate in the parts of the workspace that belong to them. Nothing sensitive is one wrong click away from the wrong person.

Audit logs quietly do the work that used to consume entire weeks. Every change is captured as it happens, which means evidence is always ready rather than reconstructed.

When an audit comes, the trail is already there. We are not scrambling to assemble it across five systems anymore.

The compliance team uses Slate to track regulatory work against real deadlines, with each requirement tied to the tasks moving it forward. Instead of living in a spreadsheet that drifts out of date, the company's compliance picture stays current and visible.

What changed

The clearest change was that security stopped being a reason to stay fragmented.

For the first time, our most regulated teams work in the same place as everyone else.

Work that used to be quarantined in separate tools came into one workspace, with the controls to keep it compliant. The walls between teams came down without any of the protections coming down with them.

Audit preparation went from a recurring fire drill to something closer to a non-event. And the company stopped paying the quiet tax of working around its own security requirements, because the tool finally met them head on.

The result

FocalPoint now runs on Slate across every team, regulated or not.

The company moves faster because the barriers between its teams are gone, and it does so without giving up an inch on security. Audits that once swallowed weeks of preparation now draw on a trail that is always there. And the security team, rather than guarding the gates against yet another unapproved tool, finally has one it trusts.

Slate let us bring the whole company into one place and still pass every audit. We did not think we would find a tool that could do both.

For a company whose business is built on trust, working in a tool worthy of that trust turned out to matter just as much as the trust it sells.