WidasConcepts cidaas

Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) is a rapidly expanding specialty within IAM, driven by organizations’ need to deliver better digital experiences while collecting, storing, and analyzing consumer data to improve sales opportunities and brand loyalty. In regulated sectors—especially banking—CIAM also supports “Know Your Customer” requirements intended to reduce money laundering, cyber-crime, terrorist financing, and fraud. CIAM platforms further assist with privacy and consent obligations such as GDPR by collecting clear consent, enabling consumer dashboards for managing data-sharing choices, enforcing consistent privacy policies, and gathering acknowledgement when terms change. In the EU, PSD2 adds pressure for strong customer authentication and behavioral analysis for transaction authorization, creating both compliance needs and competitive differentiation opportunities for firms that implement sophisticated CIAM capabilities.

cidaas, a multi-tenant CIAM SaaS offering from WidasConcepts (founded in Wimsheim, Germany in 1997), provides core CIAM features including self-registration (often via social logins), SSO across digital properties, multiple authentication methods, profile storage, SaaS integration, and fine-grained access control. It supports username/password, OTP (email/phone/SMS), mobile push, social logins (e.g., Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Amazon, Microsoft), and integrations with authenticators and biometrics (Touch ID, Face ID, FIDO U2F, and voice recognition). cidaas supports federated protocols such as JWE, JWT, OAuth2, and OIDC, delegated administration, REST APIs, and webhooks for broader integrations.

The product emphasizes consent management (including alignment to the Kantara Consent Receipt specification), data export and deletion, and parental controls via family groupings. It also targets IoT and retail use cases, linking identities to devices (e.g., door openers, cameras) and enabling location-aware experiences with facial recognition and beacons, contingent on strong consent practices. Strengths include ease of deployment, scaling via microservices, and forward-looking physical/IoT use cases, while challenges include limited built-in analytics, lack of third-party threat intelligence ingestion, and a relatively small geographic footprint.

• CIAM is described as the fastest growing specialty within IAM in recent years.
• Regulators require banks and financial service providers to implement “Know Your Customer” mechanisms to reduce financial crime and fraud.
• GDPR requires clear and unambiguous consumer consent for the use of personal data.
• PSD2 in the EU requires strong customer authentication and user behavioral analysis for authorizing monetary transactions.
• WidasConcepts was founded in Wimsheim, Germany in 1997.
• cidaas is a fully multi-tenant CIAM SaaS solution and can also be run on-premises for large enterprise customers.
• cidaas supports authentication options including OTP via email/phone/SMS, mobile push notifications, and voice recognition biometrics.
• cidaas supports federated protocols including JWE, JWT, OAuth2, and OIDC.
• cidaas operates in data centers within Germany and uses a microservices architecture for rapid scaling and de-provisioning.
• As of mid-2018, cidaas managed nearly 2 million consumer identities and processed 5,000 logins per second.

• “Enterprises want to collect, store, and analyze data on consumers to create additional sales opportunities and increase brand loyalty.”
• “Having IAM systems dedicated to hosting consumer identities and their associated profiles is a good first step toward KYC.”
• “GDPR requires collecting clear and unambiguous consent from consumers for the use of their data.”
• “Many CIAM solutions provide this capability, plus offer consumers dashboards to manage their information sharing choices.”
• “The Revised Payment Service Directive (PSD2) in the EU will require banks, financial institutions, and other payment service providers to offer strong customer authentication (SCA) and perform user behavioral analysis.”
• “Consumer identity solutions are increasingly under attack by fraudsters.”
• “The melding of consumer identities with consumer-owned devices is a high priority and growth area.”
• “The micro-services architecture allows for rapid scaling and de-provisioning to accommodate heavy or unexpected loads.”
• “The service would benefit by supporting more authenticators, developing enhanced risk adaptive authentication functions, adding 3rd party fraud/risk/threat intelligence integration capabilities.”
• “This could become a unique selling proposition in the near future.”