Market Segment

The CIAM market is growing and there is room for much further expansion, with many vendors offering mature solutions providing standard and deluxe features to support millions of users across every industrial sector. As will be reflected in this report, the solutions in this space are quite diverse. Some vendors have about every feature one could want in a CIAM product, while others are more specialized, and thus have different kinds of technical capabilities. For example, some smaller vendors are targeting the government-tocitizen (G2C) market as well as business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C). Businesses in finance have AML and KYC requirements, which drives the technical need for higher identity and authentication assurance solutions. We more commonly see support for onboarding consumers by validating digital accounts against national e-IDs, passports, driver’s licenses, and x.509 certificates at registration time using mobile apps that do selfie photo matching and data retrieval over NFC. Select companies in the hospitality industry, especially the short-term rentals market, are looking for CIAM solutions with the ability to verify credentials at the time of booking. The types of customers that require higher assurance identity proofing also tend to need higher assurance authentication mechanisms as well.

Furthermore, KuppingerCole research indicates that the particular market segments that vendors choose to target often has a direct effect on the type of features available in their CIAM solutions. For example, CIAM vendors that are primarily pursuing retail and media companies as clients tend to not have as much customer-driven pressure to support high assurance identification and authentication and complex attributebased access controls.

Download KuppingerCole Report Leadership Compass Whitepaper