What is CIAM?

Customer identity and access management (CIAM) enables organizations to securely capture and manage customer identity and profile data and control customer access to applications and services. CIAM solutions usually provide a combination of features which may include:

• Registration
• Progressive Profiling
• Single sign-on (SSO)
• Authentication
• A multi-factor authentication (MFA) solution
• Passkeys & passwordless authentication
• Self-service account management (consents & account resets)
• Consent and preference management
• Dynamic Authorization
• Directory service
• Identity verification
• Fraud Mitigation (Deep Fakes, Account Takeover, New Account Fraud)
• Relationship Management
• Digital credentials and decentralized identity
• Identity orchestration

The best CIAM solutions ensure all customers have seamless and secure experiences at scale that respect their privacy and instill trust, no matter which channels (web, mobile, etc.) they use to engage with a brand. Since businesses invest heavily in pixel perfect branding and experiences in their products and services, it's also critical that CIAM solutions are able to adhere to those customized experiences.

How Are CIAM Solutions Consumed?

These solutions can be delivered via software that can be deployed on premise or in private clouds, or via software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms. Many solutions cater to businesses who want more granular control by offering dedicated- or multi-tenant SaaS, and hybrid deployment options. This granularity can be beneficial for unique scale and performance requirements, or meeting data residency requirements—we'll get to more on those things later.

Platforms also cater usability to both the IAM administrators who centrally maintain CIAM solutions, application developers who must get the CIAM solutions up and running in their applications, and marketing and business leaders who aim to craft customized experiences.

• For administrators: CIAM solutions deliver administrative interfaces and UIs simplify the management of customer identities (including low-code/no-code user journeys and integrations), enforce centralized access and multi-factor authentication (MFA) policies, and provide audit capabilities. Many also offer APIs to automate administrative functions.
• For application developers: CIAM solutions offer standard and financial-grade secure APIs, SDKs, sample code, documentation, communities, and integration tools, enabling them to quickly embed CIAM capabilities into their applications and refine their user experiences.
• For marketing and business leaders: CIAM solutions facilitate omni-channel personalization, ensure that access experiences are easy-to-use, integrate with MarTech stacks, and match the pixel perfect branding that businesses have invested in.

Why is CIAM Important?

Customers are the lifeblood of any business. CIAM solutions deliver three foundational capabilities to customers that can make make the difference between loyalty and attrition to competitors:

• Impress customers with seamless user experiences that drive loyalty
• Protect customers from fraud and breaches
• Respect customers by complying with privacy regulations and best practices

How CIAM Solutions Deliver Seamless Customer Experiences

Core IAM functions like sign-in, account recovery, and registration in particular can be points of frustration for users. Decisions around how much information to collect, how to leverage progressive profiling to shorten registration forms, offering social registration, and other decisions can make or break a business's first impression with potential customers. Delighting your customers means ensuring their journey from prospect to loyal brand advocate is as smooth as possible.

CIAM's role in the journey to customer loyalty doesn't stop there. Once customers are signed in, CIAM is the backbone of omnichannel personalization, making it feel like businesses know them without being overly intrusive. CIAM solutions allow you to collect data from customer interactions with your website, apps, and partner apps behind the scenes, giving you a well-developed customer profile without putting unnecessary friction in the customer's way.

CIAM solutions are also built to be incredibly scalable. This is key to customer experiences because it ensures that critical services are available and fast when customers need them, even during peak usage scenarios. They can also leverage capabilities like passkeys, digital credentials (via decentralized identity), or other methods that do away with customers having to sign in entirely. Research shows that if you fall short of providing an exceptional experience around these critical CIAM components, your customers will get frustrated, and abandon you for competitors.

Given what's at stake, a great customer experience is no longer just nice to have; it's a critical differentiator. Users have little patience for bad or clunky digital interactions: according to a customer survey around brand loyalty, nearly half of customers would leave a brand for a competitor if the competitor had significantly better login experiences. Poor registration experiences, frustrating account recovery processes, unreasonable password policies, and systems going down after major product launches all contribute to customer churn. And they're all things CIAM solutions can streamline.

Given the fact that it costs more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one, organizations need to get customer experience right.

How CIAM Solutions Protect Customers from Fraud and Breaches

CIAM solutions are critical to protecting customers and their data. Customer Identity and Access Management is like the lock on your front door. It lets your customers in and keeps fraudsters out. Customers also care deeply about security. 43% of consumers have experienced fraud from having personal information stolen online. Fraud and breaches carry a variety of costs for businesses and stolen or compromised credentials are often to blame. The global average cost of a data breach in 2024 was $4.88M. Phishing and stolen or compromised credentials were the most common cause of breaches, costing businesses an average of $4.81M per breach through that attack vector.

Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solutions ensure that digital services recognize customers. Sophisticated analysis of customer behavior, where they last signed in, whether credentials have been recently compromised, details about the device a customer is signing in from, and many more give businesses a high degree of confidence that their customers are who they say they are. Leveraging these behind-the-scenes signals also reduces friction for the users, and can even allow users to bypass login entirely. If these signals deem that risk is high, CIAM systems can require multi-factor authentication (MFA) or two-factor authentication (2FA) to raise the level of assurance. For high-value transactions, such as opening a bank account or applying for a loan, identity verification can work to connect a digital user with a real-life, government-issued identity—including liveness checks and selfie matching to ensure the user being verified is the same one from the ID.

How CIAM Solutions Respect Customer Privacy

Customers care about their privacy. According to Ping's 2024 Consumer Survey: 69% of global consumers say privacy and consent is a critical aspect of their overall experience when interacting with brands online.

Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solutions allow businesses to comply with privacy regulations by giving customers control over who their data is shared with, allowing them to manage opt-out preferences, consents, and ensuring their data is stored in-region to comply with data residency requirements.

Decentralized Identity is a recent addition to CIAM solutions that is gaining adoption quickly. It allows customers to leverage a digital wallet to control who has access to their personal data, and even revoke that data when they no longer want a business to have access to it.

These capabilities make CIAM a cornerstone of regulatory compliance and customer trust.

How is CIAM Different from IAM?

As customers have distinct requirements in contrast to employees, Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) is built to cater to their demands, providing both the security and convenience that customers expect while traditional identity and access management (IAM) focuses on providing secure access to internal systems and applications for employees, without necessarily prioritizing the ease of use and convenience that customers demand. While use cases have converged or overlapped, there are still some differences between the two disciplines.

CIAM Features:

Registration

Registration is the first touchpoint a user has with a business's digital properties. Often businesses spend millions driving people to a registration page. If that page fails, it's wasted money. CIAM addresses several key points in the registration process to ensure customers have a good first impression:

• Social Registration allows users to register using existing accounts (Google, Facebook, or others) in just a couple of clicks.
• Digital Credentials also offer an instant registration option that respects customer privacy and can reduce the need to fill out any forms (more on that in the digital credentials section).
• Consent and Terms of Service are incorporated into registration processes to help businesses comply with privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA.

Progressive Profiling

Progressive profiling allows organizations to collect user data gradually over time, rather than all at once during account registration. Instead of asking users to provide a lot of personal information upfront—something that can lead to form abandonment—progressive profiling builds the user profile in stages as users engage with a brand over multiple interactions.

This approach is particularly important for improving conversion rates and customer experience, especially in industries like retail or telecommunications where long registration forms can deter users. By requesting minimal information during the initial interaction (e.g., name and email), and then progressively gathering more details (e.g., preferences, phone number) as the relationship develops, businesses can personalize services without overwhelming users.

Single sign-on (SSO)

Single sign-on (SSO) enables users to access multiple applications with one login, simplifying the user experience and reducing password fatigue. This is critical for companies who may have several disparate applications that customers interact with. A common example of this is a bank that may have separate logins for loans, accounts, bill pay, etc. vs one with a single sign-on enabled that seamlessly connects you to different applications so conveniently, that you may not even realize they're separate applications. CIAM supports several key SSO capabilities to streamline authentication:

• Federated Identity allows users to log in across different services using a single set of credentials, whether it's within the same organization or with third-party partners.
• Cross-Domain SSO ensures that users can move across different domains (websites, mobile apps) without having to log in again, providing a consistent experience.
• Standards such as Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and OpenID Connect (OIDC) enable secure, scalable SSO across different platforms, ensuring interoperability and security.

Authentication

Authentication verifies a user's digital identity before granting access to services. It's critical to get right as it occurs over and over again throughout the customer lifecycle. Doing it wrong can skyrocket abandonment rates. CIAM solutions support multiple authentication methods to ensure both security and convenience:

• Username and Password is the traditional method but is often complemented by more secure options, given the vulnerability of passwords to breaches.
• Adaptive Authentication assesses risk factors like device, location, and behavior, prompting additional steps only when necessary to minimize user friction while enhancing security.
• Keep me Signed in options during login allow users to stay logged in for longer periods without reauthenticating. CIAM solutions can extend sessions in this way while still monitoring for risky activity that may trigger the need to step up or reauthenticate.
• Call Center Authentications are critical to CIAM solutions and can extend identity verification and account management processes to call center agents, enabling them to securely and conveniently authenticate users over the phone, often by integrating with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems.

These authentication features ensure users experience low-friction access while maintaining strong security protocols.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) adds an extra layer of security by requiring users to provide two or more verification factors to access their accounts. This significantly reduces the risk of unauthorized access. It typically includes combining multiple factors that include something you know (e.g., password), something you have (e.g., a phone for a code) or something you are (e.g., biometrics like fingerprints). Many CIAM help fine-tune MFA to balance security and convenience.

• Adaptive MFA decides whether or not to require MFA based on risk signals during the authentication process. Bypassing MFA for low-risk scenarios can be important to reduce friction for users.
• SMS MFA is not as secure as other mediums such as push notifications, however, customer-facing brands often cannot force users to download their mobile apps or leverage a third-party authenticator app. SMS is an easy-to-adopt method that most already have on their phones.
• Push Notifications and App-Based MFA For users willing to download a brand's mobile application push notifications offer a more user friendly and secure alternative to SMS-based authentication, which is more vulnerable to interception.

These MFA options strike the right balance between robust security and user convenience, helping prevent breaches while maintaining a positive user experience.

Passwordless authentication

Passwordless authentication removes the need for traditional passwords, providing a more secure and user-friendly login experience. CIAM solutions offer various passwordless methods to suit different security and convenience needs:

• Email Magic Links send one-time authentication links to a user's email or phone, allowing them to log in by clicking the link, without needing a password.
• One-Time-Passcodes (OTP) for Email and SMS deliver a code to the email address or phone number (through SMS) that's registered with their account. Then the user enters that code to sign-on instead of a password.
• QR Codes allow users to scan a code with their mobile device for instant, secure authentication, eliminating the need for credentials. This is especially convenient for devices such as TVs that have restricted inputs.
• FIDO2 Passkeys leverage public-private key cryptography, where a private key is securely stored on the user's device. When a user unlocks their device (e.g. via fingerprint or facial recognition), this trust is then passed to the applications the user is accessing on that device, giving instant authentication with no passwords.
• FIDO2 Biometrics incorporates biometric authentication techniques, such as fingerprint recognition, facial recognition, iris scanning, or voice recognition, to verify a user's identity. Instead of relying on static passwords. These types of unique biological characteristics that are difficult to replicate, providing a higher level of security against various authentication threats.

These passwordless methods ensure stronger security while reducing friction, improving user experience across all platforms.

Self-service account management

Self-service account management empowers users to independently manage their accounts without needing assistance from support teams. CIAM solutions offer a range of capabilities for self-service management:

• Self-Service Account Recovery gives users the option to recover their accounts by resetting their passwords or identifying their usernames without having to contact a support rep. This can involve identity verification, one-time-passcodes, or other methods to enhance security.
• Profile Updates allow users to modify personal information, like email addresses or phone numbers, directly through the interface.
• Omnichannel Preference management allows users to update their preferences, including opt-in/out preferences. Those preferences persist regardless of which digital medium (website, mobile app, etc.) a customer is using to access a brand. This gives businesses the opportunity to recognize customers consistently across all interaction points.
• Delegated administration many businesses allow users to delegate access to children or family members for various reasons (more on this in the B2B and relationships section).
• User Consent captures and stores explicit user permissions for data usage, ensuring compliance with privacy laws like GDPR, CCPA and other regional and state-sponsored laws. This includes the ability to opt in or out of specific data uses.
• Data Subject Rights (DSRs) empower users to request access to, correct, or delete their personal data, as mandated by privacy laws, further building trust with the brand.

These features improve user experience by reducing friction and enabling customers to handle account tasks on their own, while ensuring compliance with privacy laws.

Dynamic Authorization

Dynamic authorization (also known as context-based access control) ensures that users have access only to the resources and data they are permitted to use, providing a crucial layer of security in CIAM. CIAM solutions offer advanced capabilities to handle authorization efficiently:

• Fine-Grained Authorization allows businesses to centrally define detailed access control policies based on attributes like user roles, location, device type, or any other data a business has access to. This ensures that access is tailored precisely to each user's needs and security requirements, enhancing both security and flexibility.
• Transaction Approval requires evaluating and granting access to specific high-value transactions (such as a wire transfer) and is another important use of fine-grained authorization.
• Third-Party Data Access Controls let customers consent to and control which data third party businesses have access to. For example, if a customer wants to grant access for their accountant to look at finances in their bank.
• Step-up Authorization lets businesses invoke MFA or identity verification to raise levels of assurance in high risk authorization scenarios.
• API Authorization controls access to backend services and data via APIs. With API authorization, businesses can securely manage who or what services can access sensitive data, preventing unauthorized requests and maintaining data integrity.

These features ensure robust, scalable authorization that not only supports complex access scenarios but also helps businesses enforce post-authorization security and comply with data protection regulations like GDPR and CCPA by limiting unnecessary access to sensitive data.

Directory service

A directory service in CIAM is a central repository that securely stores user identities and attributes, providing a foundation for authentication, authorization, and other identity-related operations. CIAM directory services are built to handle large-scale user bases and offer several key capabilities:

• Unified Customer Profile directory can synchronize user data in real-time and give businesses a single place to view all of their customer data and preferences across their entire application portfolio.
• Scalability to ensure that millions of identities can be managed efficiently, supporting both high-traffic scenarios and long-term growth for customer databases.
• Real-Time Access allows applications to quickly retrieve identity information for authentication and personalization, ensuring a seamless customer experience across platforms.
• Schema Flexibility lets businesses customize the structure of user data, allowing for the storage of various attributes based on the needs of different applications and services without having to execute risky schema migrations.

These directory services are critical for providing fast, secure access to identity data, supporting both performance and security at scale.

Identity verification

Identity verification ensures that users are who they claim to be by connecting a digital user identity to a real-world identity. In CIAM, this is particularly important for high-value transactions and compliance with regulations like AML (Anti-Money Laundering) and KYC (Know Your Customer):

• Document Verification requires users to upload government-issued IDs or other documents to verify their identity. This is commonly used for high-risk scenarios, such as opening financial accounts or accessing sensitive information.
• Liveness Checks and Selfie Matching ensures the user is present at the time of registration or authentication and that the selfie image used for verification is a real, live person and not a replayed image, mask, deep fake, or another imposter image.

In today's digital-first world, if you can't trust your user's identity, you're at greater risk of fraudulent activity. With identity verification, you can strengthen security by ensuring you know that your users are who they say they are at critical points in the account lifecycle.

Fraud Mitigation (Deep Fakes, Account Takeover, New Account Fraud)

Fraud mitigation in CIAM solutions safeguards both businesses and customers from increasingly sophisticated threats like malicious bots, deep fakes, account takeovers, and new account fraud. These solutions employ a variety of advanced detection techniques:

• Account Takeover (ATO) Prevention detects and responds to suspicious activity using various risk signals, including behavioral biometrics (tracking user habits like typing speed or patterns), impossible travelocity (flagging geographically unrealistic login attempts), and other risk-based factors to prompt additional authentication when necessary.
• New Account Fraud prevents the creation of fake accounts by screening for fraudulent registrations through identity verification and behavioral analysis. This process also detects bot-driven account creation attempts, stopping automated systems from generating large volumes of fraudulent accounts.

These capabilities ensure comprehensive protection against fraud while maintaining a seamless user experience.

Relationship Management

Managing multiple users or profiles under the same account is critical to delivering tailored experiences by understanding and maintaining each user and account preferences. Customers may interact with the organization differently through different profiles. A parent may have multiple child profiles and give them different levels of access based on their age but also would want to manage and control that access based on the devices they are using.

• Delegated Administration allows users to give some control of their accounts to others as needed. For example aging parents can give some control of their medical records to their kids so the kids can make important decisions if needed.
• Complex Relationship Modeling allows organizations to understand their users and how they use the service better to deliver context based access. For example parents can set up controls that determine what level of content a child can view on their living room TV which may be different from what they can see on their phones.

Understanding such parent-child, user-device and user-content relationships is critical to grant right access, permissions, and interactions between the user, their devices, and the services they rely on. Some organizations may extend the relationship management to Business-to-Business (B2B) scenarios as well.

Digital credentials and decentralized identity

Digital credentials and decentralized identity (DCI) represent the future of user registration/onboarding, authentication, and privacy, offering individuals more control over their personal information. DCI gives control of identity data back to your customers. It lets you verify IDs and issue digital credentials based on verified identity attributes. Users can share digital credentials with organizations to quickly and effortlessly prove who they are. CIAM solutions that incorporate these technologies enhance both security and user autonomy:

• Digital Credentials allow enterprises to verify and share data in a privacy-preserving way. Verifiable credentials consist of any attribute that can be attached to a person and contain important information about the issuer, to whom the credential was issued, and when it expires. They are stored in a cryptographically secure way via a digital wallet or app. Users present credentials to access services without revealing excessive personal data. For example, a digital driver's license stored on a mobile device could be used for identity and age verification to purchase alcohol without exposing unnecessary information like an address or a raw birth date. Another example is sharing an insurance carrier's proof of insurance with a healthcare provider.
• Reduced Attack Surfaces are another benefit of decentralized identity. By removing personally-identifiable information, or PII from a centrally stored location (e.g. in a company's user data store) it becomes much more difficult for bad actors to target valuable PII treasure troves.
• Instant Registration through decentralized identity can allow customers to scan a QR code to instantly fill out a form. Not only is it more convenient, but the data entered is verified by a trusted provider (e.g. government authorities, credit score entities, etc.), which is not the case when customers self-fill registration forms.
• Reusable Identity Verification while one-off identity verification is valuable for CIAM instances like applying for loans or opening bank accounts, reusable digital credentials create an ongoing link that can reduce the costs and burden of identity verifications, remain up-to-date, and be verified over and over again for different high-value transactions.

By enabling verified data exchanges via credentials without relying on a central authority, decentralized identity solutions are gaining traction in industries like finance, healthcare, and education, where privacy and data integrity are paramount.

These technologies are critical in meeting evolving data privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, while empowering users with more control over their digital identities.

Identity orchestration

Identity orchestration automates and streamlines identity workflows, enabling businesses to build secure, flexible identity experiences without complex coding. CIAM platforms offer:

• Low-code/no-code Integrations simplify connecting multiple identity services (e.g., MFA, SSO) via a visual interface, allowing teams to create workflows quickly. Many of the services discussed in this blog can be dragged and dropped from the CIAM service provider or third parties with modern, vendor agnostic orchestration services.
• Visual Design Interfaces give administrators a no-code or low-code environment where businesses can design authentication flows without needing deep technical expertise.
• Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) Flows: Pre-built workflows for common scenarios like password resets, account recovery, and passwordless authentication, that exemplify industry best practices can be leveraged out-of-the-box or customized to meet specific business needs.
• A/B Testing allows businesses to test different authentication methods (e.g., passwordless vs. MFA), or third-party fraud services to optimize user experience and security in real time.
• Bespoke experiences are key for large businesses with multiple types of users such as B2B, premium, or standard. Orchestration allows businesses to easily craft and test different experiences based on the type of user they're catering to.
• Instant App Updates (via mobile SDKs): CIAM platforms support instant updates to authentication workflows on mobile apps, eliminating the need for new app versions. For example, if you're updating a service to decrease the risk levels that require MFA, those updates are instantly propagated to mobile apps via SDKs.

Identity orchestration gives businesses an easy-to-use, paint-by-numbers approach that helps them start from a strong foundation, using identity management best practices while still allowing for customization to match their requirements.

Can I Use a Consolidated IAM Solution For My Workforce and My Customers?

Absolutely! Some CIAM solutions are considered "consolidated solutions" that can deliver a rich set of IAM capabilities for customers, employees, and business partners. This consolidation can offer significant benefits and cost savings by centralizing identity management for employees, customers, and business partners. Instead of managing multiple, disparate systems, businesses can streamline their identity processes, ensuring consistent security policies across all user types. This reduces operational complexity, lowers administrative overhead, and minimizes the risk of security breaches.

By unifying identity management, businesses can scale more efficiently, accommodating both the complexities of employee access and the volume and scale demands of consumer access. Cost savings are realized through reduced infrastructure costs, fewer integration challenges, and more efficient management of user lifecycles. Additionally, a single identity platform reduces the need for multiple point solutions, allowing businesses to leverage built-in fraud prevention, digital credentialing, and advanced authentication features in one place. This approach not only cuts down on costs but also improves user experience and operational efficiency.

Conclusion: Putting the Customer First with CIAM

Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solutions are vital for creating secure, seamless, and personalized customer experiences. They let businesses:

• Impress customers with great experiences that impact key business metrics such as increasing customer satisfaction, decreasing abandonment rates, and driving revenue growth. Streamlined omni-channel personalization also helps companies acquire new customers and turn prospects into loyal brand advocates.
• Protect customers from fraud and breach by evaluating risk and mitigating account takeovers, data breaches, and protecting from deep fakes and other nascent AI threats by verifying user identities in real-time.
• Respect customer privacy by collecting and enforcing customer consent, enforcing data residency requirements, and complying with privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

CIAM solutions must cater to administrators by simplifying identity management and integrations; to developers by providing secure APIs, documentation, and integration tools; and to marketing and business leaders by enabling omnichannel personalization, MarTech integrations, and brand customization.

Customers must be able to access the services and products of businesses, so CIAM is not optional. Companies often build in-house solutions early in their identity maturity cycle. Unfortunately these may require heavy investments in maintenance, may risk shortcomings in security, and can quickly fall behind the innovation curve of the solutions provided by modern vendors. And these systems cannot easily respond to shocks such as mergers and acquisitions, forcing enterprises to run non-integrated identity solutions that can degrade the customer experience.

Investing in solutions who have refined the experiences and best practices that will differentiate from your competition, cater to your bespoke ecosystems, and handle the massive peak scale and performance requirements is critical for customer retention and trust.

Prioritizing best-in-class customer identity means unlocking growth, driving loyalty, and staying ahead in today's competitive landscape.