Identity Is a Control Plane for Modernization

Identity is no longer just the gate at login. It helps determine how an organization grows, serves customers, manages risk, and introduces new technology.

A strong identity foundation can help organizations:

• Build lasting customer relationships through secure, low-friction experiences.
• Acquire customers faster with simpler onboarding and stronger identity proofing.
• Strengthen trust across channels, transactions, partner relationships, and digital services.
• Support ecosystem growth through secure APIs, financial innovation, embedded finance, and delegated access.
• Make compliance easier with consistent policy, consent, and audit trails.
• Bring new products and services to market more safely.

This is why fraud prevention, customer experience, compliance, and modernization are increasingly connected. Each depends on knowing who or what is acting, understanding the risk, and applying the right control at the right moment.

The Cost of Fragmented Identity

Many institutions still use separate identity controls for customers, employees, contractors, brokers, suppliers, applications, and privileged users. Over time, these silos create duplicate policies, uneven levels of assurance, limited visibility, and slow handoffs between security, fraud, and infrastructure teams.

That creates three practical problems:

A better model is a converged identity fabric: a shared, policy-driven foundation that can continuously verify people and nonhuman actors, authorize actions, coordinate workflows, and keep a clear record of what happened.

What the Joint Approach Enables

Together, they give financial institutions a practical path forward. Organizations can connect legacy identity environments to newer architectures, apply adaptive controls to sensitive journeys, and create more consistent experiences across programs. The result is a stronger trust fabric that supports modernization without adding another disconnected tool.

Govern AI Agents as Identities

AI agents create a new governance challenge. An agent may act, make decisions, call services, or initiate transactions on behalf of a person or organization.

Traditional user authentication alone cannot answer the questions that matter most:

• What is the agent allowed to do?
• Who gave it that authority?
• Which policy applies?
• When is human approval needed?
• How can the institution prove what happened?

Financial institutions should treat AI agents as first-class identities. That means authenticating them, giving them only the access they need, tying delegated authority to policy, applying controls while they operate, and recording important actions. High-risk activity may require additional verification, step-up controls, or human oversight.

This makes AI governance part of day-to-day operations rather than something added after deployment. It helps institutions adopt automation while preserving accountability, privacy, and regulatory visibility.

Priority Use Cases for GCP Customers

• Fraud reduction across onboarding, login, account recovery, and high-risk transactions through identity proofing, risk signals, adaptive authentication, and continuous verification.
• Legacy IAM modernization by connecting older identity stores and access systems to a consistent hybrid- and cloud-ready architecture.
• Third-party and ecosystem access through federation, delegated administration, and policy-based controls for contractors, brokers, vendors, and partners.
• Privileged access protection through just-in-time, time-bound permissions instead of standing credentials.
• Runtime governance for AI and automation by verifying agents, limiting actions, and maintaining clear audit trails.

The Path Forward

Financial institutions do not have to choose between modernization, fraud reduction, customer experience, and AI readiness. They can make progress on all four by treating identity as a strategic control plane.

Security leaders gain stronger control over identity-based risk. IAM leaders gain a clearer path to modernization. Fraud leaders can intervene earlier and use precise step-up controls instead of applying blanket friction. Business leaders gain a foundation for trusted growth, stronger customer relationships, faster innovation, and more consistent compliance.

Ping Identity and Google Cloud offer a joint path to modernize securely, reduce friction and fraud, and establish the runtime trust model needed for the next generation of financial services.