Fifth Third Bank was facing another price increase without a reliable way to count active users. WND Terminal lowered the per-seat cost and gave IT the usage data it needed to set the next renewal.
Before and after
| Before | After WND Terminal | |
|---|---|---|
| Annual emulator cost | $2.22M ($300 a seat), rising 9–14% a year | $430K ($95 a seat), price fixed for 3 years |
| How seat counts were set | The last true-up, plus 10% "to be safe" | 90-day usage by department |
| Seats paid for but unused | Unknown (later found to be about 3,300) | Reviewed every quarter |
| Answering "who uses this?" | Three weeks of emails to department heads | One screen, exported to Excel |
| Renewal process | 4 months of audits, redlines and escalations | One call and a signed order form |
The bank had no reliable count of active users.
Fifth Third has run its core banking on the mainframe for decades. Almost everyone who touches a customer account goes through a 3270 screen at some point. That includes a teller fixing a hold, a contact center agent reversing a fee, or a loan processor boarding a mortgage. The emulator is invisible infrastructure, until the renewal arrives.
"Every spring we'd get the renewal, and every spring it went up," Kessler says. "Nine percent one year, fourteen the next. I'd ask what we were getting for it, and the answer was basically 'continued access.' The product looked exactly like it did when I started here."
The bigger problem was that nobody knew how many seats the bank really needed. The legacy contract counted installs, not people, and its audit clause let the vendor true up whenever it liked. So Fifth Third kept buying for the worst case. When branches closed or teams moved to web apps, nobody gave seats back, because nobody could prove which ones were safe to cut.
"We were buying insurance against an audit, not software," Kessler says. "And the vendor knew it."
Why WND Terminal
Kessler's team first looked at WND Terminal to save money. The price per seat came in under a third of the legacy vendor's renewal quote, even before any reduction in seat count. But the deciding factor was the license usage dashboard.
WND Terminal records each session on the machine where it runs: who, which computer, when, and how long they were active. It never records what's on the screen or what anyone types. Each copy writes that log to a network folder IT chooses. The dashboard reads the folder plus an export from Active Directory, so it also lists people who have the app installed but never use it. Nothing leaves the bank's network, and the app never phones home.
"Security asked me three times whether it sends data to WND," Kessler says. "It doesn't. It's a file on our share. That's what got it through review in two weeks instead of two quarters."
The commercial terms mattered just as much. WND's license is a signed file the app checks offline. If a renewal runs late, the app keeps working: IT admins get a reminder after 30 days, and users see a banner after 60, but nobody is ever locked out. There's no audit clause and no surprise true-up.
The rollout
Fifth Third ran a 30-day pilot with 150 people in deposit operations, then rolled out in waves over 11 weeks:
- Import, don't rebuild. The team dropped their existing session profiles and keyboard files into WND Terminal, which read the host addresses, backup hosts, code pages and every key assignment. Tellers kept the exact same keys.
- One MSI, one policy. IT pushed the installer through Group Policy, along with policies that set the bank's connections, hid card numbers, and pointed every copy at the usage folder.
- Self-service for IT. Kessler's admins sign in to the WND customer portal with the bank's own single sign-on. There they download new versions, the admin kit and the license file without opening a ticket.
- Two weeks side by side, then the switch. Both emulators ran for two weeks per wave. Help desk calls about the new one averaged four a day across the whole bank.
The results
81% lower annual cost. Most of that came from the per-seat price, $95 against $300. Right-sizing took off the rest.
After 90 days of data, the dashboard showed that 3,300 of the 7,400 licensed seats hadn't been used in three months. Most belonged to closed branches, retired job roles, and departments that had moved to web front ends years ago. Fifth Third licensed 4,500 seats, which covers everyone active plus room to grow, and reviews the numbers every quarter.
"For fifteen years I signed a check based on a guess," Kessler says. "Now I open the dashboard, sort by department, click 'Copy for Excel,' and send finance the number."
A renewal that took one call. The first WND renewal took a 30-minute call and a signed order form.
"With the old vendor, a renewal meant a sales rep, a sales engineer, a 'licensing specialist' and our procurement team going back and forth for four months," Kessler says. "WND sent a quote that matched the dashboard. When we had a question about the MSI, an engineer answered the same day. It's the easiest vendor relationship I have."
No change for the people doing the work. Branch and contact center staff use the same keys, connections and screens as before. They also get things they never had, like clickable PF keys and a dark mode.
What's next
Fifth Third is turning on WND's Explain feature for its IT operations team, using an AI model it hosts in-house. It also plans to use the usage data to move contact center seats into a shared pool.
