by Geethika Cooray, VP and GM of Identity and Access Management at WSO2
Each year, Black Friday takes place the day after Thanksgiving, which means some of the best deals and sales ahead of the holidays will be on Friday, 29th November 2024. But this doesn’t mean that consumers must wait until the main event to benefit from the savings. Over the last few weeks, deals have dropped on everything from tech to lifecycle products to luxury goods – you name it.
This means that every consecutive year Black Friday and Cyber Monday start to look quite different from previous years for retailers. We have moved away from consumers only spending on the key dates to pursuing deals spread over the whole shopping period. With the introduction of shopping in the Metaverse, social media stores like TikTok shop, and various marketplaces, now more than ever, retailers need to ensure that they can deliver a positive multichannel consumer experience in a safe and trusted way.
This places a greater emphasis on the importance of customer data privacy and maintaining secure customer profiles, which in turn is accelerating the adoption of customer identity and access management (CIAM) solutions. With digital eCommerce, how companies manage consumer customer data, identity, access, and profiles will become even more of a priority for a successful sales period.
Balancing Security and a Positive User Experience
Therefore, a CIAM solution is central to balancing security and a positive user experience in digital interactions. By effectively managing how customers access and interact with online services, CIAM enhances both security and user experience through several key features:
· Simplified and seamless authentication
· Improving security for consumer data
· Compliance with data privacy regulations
· Data centralisation for shopping personalisation
· Scalability for demand
· Consumer customer account management
A CIAM solution not only provides the ability to ensure a secure, intuitive consumer experience, but it also optimises the buying journey to build and maintain deeper customer engagement.
But it is not just retailers that are looking to build that trusted engagement with their partners. This brings us to delve more deeply into the difference between business-to-consumer (B2C) CIAM, which is what we have described above, to business-to-business (B2B) CIAM. For those less familiar, when an organisation’s customer is a consumer, this is known as B2C CIAM. When the customer is another business, this is known as B2B CIAM.
B2C CIAM Versus B2B CIAM
Organisations that interact with other businesses, whether they are customers or partners, must effectively manage access to their B2B SaaS applications for external identities, which is what is known as B2B CIAM.
In other words, B2B CIAM transforms how you secure and streamline user access to your B2B SaaS applications. It efficiently manages access for third parties, including enterprise customers and channel partners like dealers, distributors, resellers, franchisees, vendors, and other stakeholders. It delivers innovative SaaS solutions that help customer organisations digitally transform, improving user experience, productivity, and efficiency. Additionally, it provides a straightforward means to onboard customer organisations, to ensure quick adoption and time to value.
Why B2B CIAM is so important for the finance sector
In the financial services world, B2B CIAM is imperative as supply chains and partners are often in the thousands. B2B CIAM is essential for institutions trying to be secure, compliant, and customer friendly. For FinTechs, a strong B2B CIAM solution is more than just a tech tool—it’s a business accelerator.
While B2B CIAM shares fundamental concepts with B2C CIAM – like users, groups, roles, and protocols, as well as features such as authentication, authorisation, provisioning, and federation – what often differentiates B2B CIAM vendors is the experience they offer in developing, operating, and governing B2B SaaS applications.
In other words, it is important to understand how these vendors can help to improve the B2B SaaS application developer experience. And how they help to increase productivity when building B2B SaaS applications that dramatically reduce the need to create elaborate custom code for essential SaaS application building blocks. At the same time, they must ensure efficient streamlining and governance of access to your applications and API portfolio for digital operations teams. By its very nature, B2B CIAM requires customisation and adaptation to meet the needs of tenant organisations, therefore, it is important to collaborate with a vendor who has customisation front of mind.
A Case in Point
Here at WSO2, we have a long history of delivering B2B CIAM solutions to our customers. For example, Vodafone uses WSO2 B2B CIAM to secure the world’s largest IoT portal, enabling partners such as BMW, VW, Yamaha, and Amazon to deliver SIM services to their 100M+ customers so their vehicles and devices can connect to the internet. Another example is infrastructure provider Nutanix, which leverages our B2B CIAM to deliver storage and compute infrastructure to over 4000 enterprise customers in 90 countries. WSO2 simplifies the onboarding of new business partners or enterprise customers and ensures the end users of each enterprise customer or partner have seamless access to the platform and SSO across the various portals and applications within the platform – access could even be governed based on the roles of each end user or user group.
Overall, B2B CIAM solutions empower the success of the business by improving security and compliance, streamlining user experiences, facilitating scalability and integration, managing third-party identities through self-service, and driving innovation and agility. As the financial landscape continues to change and adapt, especially in busy periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when the pressure is on to move quickly without creating friction, investing in a proper B2B CIAM solution is imperative to ensure long-term growth and success.
