Chase De Vere Mortgage Management is the UK's leading independently owned mortgage broker, specialising in professional and independent mortgage advice. The company operates principally in the area of residential housing, although it also arranges mortgages for the purchase and refinancing of commercial properties as well.

Chase De Vere's headquarters are located in London's West End with regional teams based throughout the UK. Sensitive documents often need to be transferred between offices so it is essential that the company has a reliable, high speed and secure IT network to link each office to the company's corporate servers.

Chase De Vere Mortgage Management has as many as 20 agents throughout the UK that require access to its IT infrastructure. This requirement created a number of technical challenges for the organisation's IT team, headed up by Michael Schaefer, Operations & IT Director. Ease of administration was of paramount importance for Michael and his team.

The mobile nature of Mortgage Advisers connected with Chase De Vere added an additional challenging dimension. The company's dedicated professionals needed server access from locations including private workstations at home, client homes and workstations of business partners. For these mobile agents with network access to retrieve important information, a long-term mobile solution had to be found.

Chase De Vere needed authentication security to integrate with Citrix Gateway.

Citrix enables organisations to provide their remote and mobile users with desk-like access from any location ' without the cost and complexity of installing, configuring, updating and supporting client software on each device, so administration is also eased somewhat, and also without the cost of maintaining hardware tokens.

Chase De Vere mortgage management approached Swivel after the company's authentication software, PINsafe, was suggested to them. Chase de Vere required Swivel to integrate PINsafe with Citrix Gateway, a first for the company.

PINsafe ensured that only Chase De Vere's authorised users were able to login to the network. The weakest point in any security system lies in the ability of the authentication manager to be able to accurately identify the legitimate users. In a remote access situation, it is even more critical that a strong authentication system is in place.

The recent growth in sophisticated electronic attack on user identity online has increased the need for something stronger than just a password to be used in these situations, which would have traditionally been the solution. With the increase in email-borne Trojan spyware viruses and phishing attacks, passwords alone can be easily compromised. Chase De Vere selected the PINsafe solution having considered several alternatives.

PINsafe operates by generating a one-time code every time a user of the system logs in. Instead of needing a special token or client software, the system can operate with the user's mobile phone or even a normal web browser. The significant cost saving offered by PINsafe and the reduction in ongoing token management issues, convinced Chase De Vere that this was the ideal solution to meet their needs.

Chase De Vere has used PINsafe since early in 2005 and has already seen significant improvements to the individual working practices and overall advances in company-wide efficiencies.

Commenting, Michael Schaefer, Operations & IT Director said: 'We have an increasing number of mortgage advisers needing safe, secure access to files wherever they are working and this is only set to grow further in the future. We needed a 'no hassle' solution so implementing a token-based system would not have been suitable for us with the ongoing management of tokens becoming a real issue. The remote agents use their mobile 'phones to retrieve their one-time code, meaning that their busy schedules aren't compromised by having to worry about lost tokens.

'In terms of the IT team here at Chase De Vere, we simply don't have to consider the time spent chasing up lost tokens, arranging replacements and ongoing management issues, which we would have had to factor in if we had opted for a hardware token-based authentication system. We now have what I believe is an excellent integration of Citrix to provide secure network access and PINsafe for secure authentication.'