How Marqeta built an employee-first self-service experience across more than 150 apps

Joining Marqeta as the Head of Identity Security, I found a very different environment than any I'd worked with previously. Marqeta is 100% cloud-based, with almost no on-premises footprint, and every workforce service is a SaaS. That presented new identity challenges that even many vendors in the identity market haven’t fully kept up with.

Marqeta is an engineering-led company and Identity governance has historically been built by engineers, not identity specialists. While their solutions worked well at our current size, they weren't as scalable, user-friendly, or audit-ready as we needed for the next phase of our growth. We were ready to treat Identity as a strategic security and governance function, as well as an engineering problem.

I joined Marqueta with a clear mission: centralize identity governance, ensure scalability, deliver an outstanding employee experience, and meet the audit and compliance needs of a growing company.

Priorities

1. Consumer-Grade User Experience: Employees expect work tools to be as intuitive as their favorite consumer apps. Driving adoption required an experience that employees would actually want to use.
2. Operational Efficiency: We needed to cut out the manual, ticket-based processes that were slowing us down, particularly around onboarding, offboarding, and access reviews.
3. Scalability and Governance: Identity management needed to scale with Marqeta's growth — handling more apps, more users, and more compliance requirements without slowing us down.

1. Consumer-Grade UX for employees and admins

When evaluating identity governance solutions, two things made Lumos stand out: A clean, intuitive UI that felt natural for employees to use; and a simple, but powerful admin experience that made app integration, policy setup, and configuration fast and painless.

2. Centralizing and Automating Key Identity Workflows

With Lumos, we centralized access requests, automated onboarding and offboarding, and brought all user access reviews into one streamlined system. In the first two months, we automated the onboarding and offboarding processes, managing access to more than 150 apps. In two more months, we centralized and improved our access review process in Lumos — work that had previously relied on CSV files, tickets, and endless manual steps.

We’ve also begun to automate the process of removing unused SaaS licenses to save on SaaS costs and apply least privilege. The flexibility of these workflows was critical in enabling adoption. For example, the ability to specify exceptions for inactivity workflows. In real-world IT, exceptions are very important. You can’t revoke access from VIP stakeholders without warning and expect to keep their support.

3. Deliver trusted results fast

Our second round of access reviews using Lumos was 40% faster than the first. Delta reviews, which highlight only the changes since the last review, made a huge difference. Managers could focus on what's important rather than rechecking the same data over and over, improving both speed and trust in the process.

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Accelerated Onboarding, Offboarding, and Access Reviews

Critical workflows that once took months and mountains of tickets were now automated within weeks, and we’re still getting faster.

Increased Focus on Strategic Initiatives

Freed from rote manual tasks, my team can now focus on integrating new applications, improving governance, and building future-ready identity capabilities. Morale has improved too — less time chasing approvals, more time solving real challenges. And external stakeholders are more responsive when I’m not constantly pinging them to complete reviews.

License Cost Savings

By leveraging Lumos' inactivity workflows, we automatically reclaimed unused SaaS licenses, reducing unnecessary spend.

Why Lumos

Lumos enables Marqeta to treat employees like consumers, delivering a seamless experience without compromising on governance. The platform is intuitive for both users and admins, integrates easily with a wide range of apps, and drives real operational and financial efficiency.

Equally important, the Lumos team has been an outstanding partner. From early implementation challenges to ongoing support, they have consistently prioritized our success without upselling or gatekeeping critical help.

At Marqeta, we believe in building scalable, user-first solutions. Lumos has helped us extend that belief to identity governance — and we’re just getting started.