Consumer Authentication

Consumer-facing organizations are replacing passwords and knowledge-based authentication because they are insecure, expensive to maintain, and degrade user experience. To reduce fraud, preserve privacy, and meet regulatory demands for strong or multi-factor authentication (including AML, EU PSD2, KYC, and New York cybersecurity law), businesses increasingly adopt CIAM solutions or add modular consumer authentication services to existing IAM stacks. Smartphones dominate these approaches because they are nearly ubiquitous and naturally serve as a “something you have” factor, enabling app-based push, OTP, and biometric authentication.

The consumer authentication market is expanding and highly diverse: some vendors provide broad “deluxe” feature sets for millions of users, while others specialize (e.g., government-to-citizen use cases with national eIDs, X.509 certificates, and higher-assurance mechanisms). Target industry shapes capabilities; vendors focused on retail/media often face less pressure for high-assurance authentication or complex, attribute-based controls. Delivery models span multi-tenant SaaS, managed services per tenant, and on-premises or IaaS deployments, with licensing commonly priced per user for SaaS and per user/server/transaction on-premises.

Common RFP requirements include multiple deployment options, social login support, rich MFA (with SMS OTP noted as still used but deprecated), adaptive risk-based authentication/authorization using contextual and device signals, and secure account recovery when authenticators are lost or replaced. KuppingerCole evaluates vendors across functionality/usability, internal security, ecosystem and scale, and specific capability areas: APIs, authenticator breadth, fraud/threat intelligence integration, mobile security (including SE/TEE and Secure Enclave usage), risk analytics, and scalability (often driven by cloud microservices and elastic capacity). Leadership ratings show strong overall leaders and an empty “Follower” segment, indicating broad maturity across surveyed solutions, while correlated matrices highlight that market dominance does not always align with product depth or innovation—reinforcing the need for requirements-driven selection and proof-of-concept validation.

• SMS OTP is still used for MFA but is deprecated due to security problems.
• Consumer authentication services primarily leverage mobile devices, particularly smartphones.
• Pure-play SaaS consumer authentication offerings are multi-tenant by design, while managed services are run independently per tenant.
• SaaS licensing is often priced per user, while on-premises licensing can be per user, per server, or per transaction.
• Overall Leaders listed are Akamai, Entrust Datacard, ForgeRock, IBM, LoginRadius, Ping Identity, and SecureAuth.
• The Followers segment is empty in the Overall Leadership view.
• Akamai Identity Cloud serves 1.7 billion consumers.
• Akamai Identity Cloud reports 99.998% uptime.
• LoginRadius manages over 1 billion consumer identities.
• Microsoft Azure AD B2C is described as supporting over one billion logins per day.

• “Password authentication is not only insecure, but it leads to poor consumer experiences and is costly for businesses to maintain.”
• “Knowledge-based authentication is an even worse alternative.”
• “Many vendors are taking an ‘API-first’ approach to consumer authentication.”
• “Identity API platforms are not always completely assembled products and services.”
• “Picking the right size vendor is an important consideration in RFPs.”
• “Not everyone needs the biggest and most scalable solutions.”
• “The Follower segment is empty, which shows that there a large number of very capable solutions in this consumer authentication solutions market.”
• “Innovation is not about delivering a constant flow of new releases.”
• “Support for standards such as GSMA Mobile Connect, FIDO Alliance, and Global Platform Secure Element (SE) and Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) standards.”
• “Selecting a vendor of a product or service must not be only based on the comparison provided by a KuppingerCole Leadership Compass.”