Live Oak Bank grows one platform across its entire business
Freshservice powers IT and enterprise service management across 12 departments at a $15 billion bank
Freshservice is our unexpected operational ecosystem—I never, four years ago, could have told you that we would have nine different business units outside of IT using this solution day in and day out.
Business challenge
A legacy ITSM implementation limited the bank’s IT service delivery
Operational teams across the bank managed requests through siloed email inboxes
Compliance requirements demanded better auditability and workflow structure
Business outcome
Freshservice became the operational hub for 12 business units beyond IT, from legal to loan ops
A single automated workflow replaced a manual email process and saves an estimated three hours daily
Custom AI capabilities integrated into Freshservice give production support engineers instant root cause analysis on customer-facing incidents
Financial Services
North America
Live Oak Bank was built on a simple promise: treat every customer like the only customer. But delivering on that promise requires a workforce that can get what it needs, fast. The bank aimed to move away from being overly reliant on email, but a legacy ITSM implementation hadn’t delivered what IT leaders expected.
Jeremy Hodges, CTO, brought in Freshservice to change that—and what began as a straightforward IT service management solution became something far bigger. As business units across the bank saw what IT had built, they wanted in. Today, Freshservice powers enterprise service management across 12 departments, running 125 agents representing 12% of the entire employee base.
"I never, four years ago, could have told you that we would have nine different business units outside of IT using this solution day in and day out," says Hodges.
The company
Live Oak Bank is a Wilmington, North Carolina-based digital-only bank with approximately 1,000 employees.
The challenge
When Hodges joined Live Oak, the organization had just emerged from an ITSM implementation that hadn’t delivered on its potential, leaving the company more reliant on email to track requests.
The problem ran deeper than IT. Across the bank, operational teams worked out of shared email inboxes with no reliable way to know whether a request had been handled, who had approved an action, or whether anything had fallen through the cracks.
What the bank needed was a platform powerful enough to serve a complex, regulated financial institution, but straightforward enough that IT could run it without a dedicated support team, and flexible enough that the rest of the business could grow into it.
The solution
Hodges had worked with Freshservice before and knew what a lean, administrator-friendly platform could do for a fast-growing organization. "I chose Freshservice so that we could find that simplicity," he says, "so that we could really focus on the end customer, the employee that was using our solutions all day, every day."
Live Oak quickly deployed a branded employee service portal called Root to give employees a single destination for answers and requests. Freshservice, powered by AWS, provided the security, scalability, and compliance capabilities a regulated financial institution requires, with every action captured in a fully auditable log.
As word spread that IT was operating more efficiently, other business units came asking. Facilities, legal, HR, finance, loan ops, deposit ops—eventually nine additional departments—each built out queues, workflows, and automations suited to their teams. A structured workflow for the bank's agriculture lending operation replaced a slow, back-and-forth email process with a clean service item. The team estimated that this single workflow, built in three to four hours, now saves three hours a day.
Live Oak has also integrated custom AI capabilities directly into Freshservice workflows. Its production support team can now automatically analyze customer-facing incidents, identify root causes across the bank's architecture, and surface findings directly on the ticket so engineers act faster without starting the analysis from scratch.
I used to have experience with other ITSM solutions where I needed entire teams just to support that platform. I chose Freshservice so we could find that simplicity—so we could really focus on our employees and servicing them to the utmost.
Jeremy Hodges
CTO, Live Oak Bank
Impact
Hodges describes Freshservice as a central nervous system connecting 12 business units through a single operational hub.
Today, 125 employees manage queues and workflows inside Freshservice across 12 business units representing 12% of the bank's entire workforce. The loan ops automation alone saves an estimated three hours daily.
By integrating custom AI capabilities directly into Freshservice workflows, Live Oak's production support team now resolves customer-facing incidents faster, with AI-generated root cause analysis surfaced directly on the ticket before an engineer ever picks it up.
"I fully expected it from an IT perspective and have been blown away by how much demand there has been from all these teams outside of IT," says Hodges. "It's easy to use. We haven't had to have an entire army of engineers to be able to do that."