Advanced user registration with PingFederate

Customer Identity & Access Management (CIAM) deployments include numerous elements though one of the key requirements is the ability for users to register.

Registration broadly falls into one of two categories:

• A user who hasn’t engaged with the company before and wants to register for services.
• A user who was previously engaged with the company though not registered; such as opening a bank account, taken out an insurance policy, registered for healthcare or entitled to government services.

The first case is well served by the out of the box functionality of CIAM vendors and is typically handled by either: by logging in through an external social identity provider such as Google or Facebook, or presenting a simple form asking customers for details such as email, first name, last name etc.

This works well for simple registrations but can soon start to produce long and complex forms. Research indicates forms should be broken down into individual questions to be easily digested and with advanced logic allowing questions to be altered depending on decisions, e.g. is the person registering under or over 21?

The second case is much more challenging. Let’s take for example the scenario of having previously opened an account with a bank and then wishing to register for Online Banking. In this scenario it is necessary to verify the following details against the held customer records:

• First name
• Last name
• Address/postcode
• Date of Birth
• Account identifier e.g. credit card number, sort code and account number etc

With this information needing to be potentially matched against multiple sources of truth e.g. the credit card system, current account system etc. Combining this with the advice to break a form into multiple sections you can quickly end up with a complex registration flow as show in the following figure: