ThreatMetrix Digital Identity Network, powered by ThreatMetrix ID

The IDaaS market has expanded in size and vendor diversity, but the umbrella term covers substantially different service types. Offerings span from Single Sign-On (SSO) to full Identity Provisioning and Access Governance for both on-premises and cloud environments, with varying support for employees, partners, customers, mobile users, and integrations back to on-premises applications. Three market segments are distinguished: IDaaS SSO (cloud access and downstream SSO), IDaaS B2E (cloud-delivered employee IAM with provisioning and governance for on-premises plus federation and baseline cloud SSO), and IDaaS Digital (newer services aimed at digital transformation requirements for customers and partners with more complex functionality).

Organizations commonly combine on-premises IAM, IDaaS, and CIAM, while weakly protected digital identity remains a major pathway to fraud and data breaches. In response, some IDaaS Digital vendors provide API-delivered services such as identity vetting, authoritative attribute retrieval, device/location context analysis, identity analytics, threat and compromised-credential intelligence ingestion, risk analysis, dynamic policy evaluation, and risk-score outputs to adaptive authentication engines. These capabilities can reduce fraud and may be required by regulation; PSD2 is highlighted as driving transaction risk analysis for most transactions above €30 in Europe.

ThreatMetrix (acquired by LexisNexis Risk Solutions/RELX) exemplifies IDaaS Digital through a cloud-based identity intelligence platform. It assigns a globally unique ThreatMetrix ID, links multiple external user identifiers for unified cross-domain views, and produces confidence, trust, and risk scores using extensive network-scale data and contextual signals. The platform emphasizes privacy-by-design with encryption, hashing of identifying fields, tenant-specific keys, and GDPR-aligned deletion requests. It does not manage end-user accounts, so it does not support LDAP/SCIM provisioning, instead relying on identifier association and just-in-time SAML provisioning. Strengths include scale, intelligence quality, end-user transparency, and integration; challenges include administrator authentication limited to username/password or SAML, feature-packaging clarity, and a need for broader standards support such as OIDC.

• IDaaS offerings range from Single Sign-On to full Identity Provisioning and Access Governance delivered as a service for on-premises and cloud solutions.
• Three IDaaS segments are defined: IDaaS SSO, IDaaS B2E, and IDaaS Digital.
• PSD2 requires banks and other financial third party providers in Europe to perform transaction risk analysis on almost every transaction above €30.
• ThreatMetrix was acquired by LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a RELX group company.
• ThreatMetrix captures and processes data on 1.4 billion user IDs, 800 million email addresses, 700 million IP addresses, and 4.5 billion devices.
• Mobile devices represented include 1.5 billion mobile devices, including 290 million mobile phones.
• ThreatMetrix captures data in 185 countries.
• Risk scores can range from -100 to 100 or be grouped into High Risk, Medium Risk, or Low Risk.
• ThreatMetrix does not create and maintain accounts directly accessible to users and therefore does not support LDAP or SCIM for provisioning.
• ThreatMetrix supports multiple cyber threat intelligence standards including TAXII, STIX, and TLP.

• “Insufficiently protected digital identity can often be a vector for data breaches and fraud.”
• “The common denominator here is the use of APIs, generally REST-based, and increasingly standardized.”
• “Such solutions must provide support for both customers and business partners and have more complex functionality.”
• “ThreatMetrix platform is an IDaaS digital solution that assigns a globally unique identifier to users across any industry and for any use case.”
• “The confidence score is a measure of how likely the user purported in the request context corresponds to ThreatMetrix ID for the associated user.”
• “The trust score reflects the performance and behavior of the subject identity.”
• “Their ExactID and SmartID attributes are device fingerprints distilled from hundreds of machine-related details on a user’s device.”
• “This allows their service to detect discrepancies and determine if devices are unwittingly participating in botnets or seeking to evade identification and detection.”
• “The ThreatMetrix Digital Identity Network was engineered using privacy-by-design principles.”
• “Most of the functions of ThreatMetrix ID described above are invisible to the end user, so their customers can gain the benefits of high assurance without impeding the consumer journey.”