In the digital age, we interact with countless applications, whether for personal, professional, or recreational purposes. Many of these applications appear consumer-oriented but are, in fact, B2B applications. By accessing healthcare services, payroll systems, or school management platforms, customers are using their provider’s applications (such as GP or employer) which is a business customer of a larger B2B application. B2B applications form an integral part of daily operations across various industries.

Businesses face several key challenges when managing B2B applications, such as inefficient onboarding, tedious admin, poor user experience, or security risks. For businesses developing B2B applications that cater exclusively to B2B and/or B2C, it is crucial to adopt appropriate identity tools and processes.

Inefficient Customer Onboarding

Using inadequate tools and relying onoutdated, manual, and ad-hoc onboarding processes is inefficient and prone to errors. This slows down the onboarding experience and makes it harder for customers to engage with businesses effectively, thereby increasing the risk of lost business opportunities and impacting the business’s ability to scale as it grows.

The focus should be on facilitating a seamless experience for customers and partners, by equipping businesses with the right B2B identity tools to automate the customer onboarding process. With self-onboarding capabilities, customers and partners can quickly register without delays, integrating smoothly through B2B identity APIs into existing customer-facing applications or with the customer’s Identity Provider (IdP) giving greater control. Alternatively, an administrative portal could manage onboarding processes efficiently and ensure that the experience is productive, streamlined, and scalable, supporting business growth by fostering smooth engagement with customers and partners.

Administrative Overhead

Ensuring employees have the appropriate access to data and systems to perform tasks within the application is critical, particularly in the event of a data breach.

The responsibility doesn’t end with initial provisioning during the onboarding process. The IT support team must continuously maintain and manage these accounts throughout their lifecycle (join, leave, or change roles) and provision or de-provision accounts accordingly. Further, the IT team is responsible for overseeing multiple partner and customer organisations. For example, orphan user accounts pose significant security risks, primarily by providing unauthorised access to sensitive data and systems. These accounts, often overlooked, can be exploited by attackers, leading to data breaches and insider threats.

Integrating B2B identity APIs into customer-facing applications can provide a self-care onboarding experience for administrators, minimising the need for manual processes. Alternatively, this can enable admin staff to invite administrators from business customers and partners to join and delegate customer administration and access relevant resources within predefined limits empowering them to manage their customers. Even if businesses lack dedicated administrative interfaces, B2B identity solutions offer portal components that can be adapted for use by partner administrators. Meanwhile, the organisation retains full control over their access through robust access control mechanisms, safeguarding security, and compliance.

Empowering administrators to manage their user accounts significantly reduces the overhead for IT support and admin teams. This practice of delegated administration shifts routine account management responsibilities—like user onboarding and de-provisioning—to the customer’s administrators. Importantly, this arrangement does not impose additional burdens on the customers' IT teams, as they are already responsible for supporting their users. This model ensures streamlined operations on both sides, improving efficiency while maintaining secure access control.

A Friction-Filled User Experience

Not having the right toolset and processes can lead to a friction-filled user experience for end users trying to access services through B2B SaaS applications in a multi-app portfolio from business customers and partners. For instance, users may be required to manage separate credentials for their business capabilities, resulting in duplicate accounts, loss of time, higher operational costs, and a cumbersome login process. Additionally, associating user profiles becomes more complex, which can hinder the provision of loyalty benefits such as reward points and discounts. This fragmented user experience can damage brand loyalty and trust, preventing IT teams from achieving business goals when onboarding new customers and partners.

To address these challenges, B2B identity solutions enable business customers and partners to use their own customer identity providers, creating a frictionless user experience for end users. This approach not only enhances loyalty between businesses but allows consumers to seamlessly access services using their existing credentials and customise the login flow to meet specific security needs such as sign-in screens, sign-up processes, and password recovery options, ensuring a smooth and cohesive experience for their customers.

Increased Operational Cost

The manual, ad-hoc onboarding process for business customers and partners, along with reliance on IT support for administrative tasks, not only proves inefficient and hampers business growth but also significantly increases operational costs, necessitating the recruitment of additional IT support staff, alongside their training and equipment expenses. As the number of business customers and partners scales, so does the requirement for IT support, often leading to stagnating profits. These rising operational costs restrict the ability to invest in critical business growth activities, such as developing new capabilities and enhancing product marketing efforts.

In contrast, B2B identity solutions offer the best return on investment (ROI) for initial investment, with costs remaining stable as the business expands. By automating the onboarding process and enabling delegated administration, B2B identity solutions can lower operational expenses over time. This allows businesses to redirect investments toward strategically important business, partnership, and customer initiatives rather than operational overhead.

Increased Security Risk

Manual and outdated processes for business customers and partners, along with reliance on IT support for administrative tasks, significantly increase security risks. Automating the self-care onboarding process reduces human touchpoints, thereby minimising security risks. Additionally, B2B identity solutions should provide essential end-to-end auditing capabilities.

Furthermore, B2B identity solutions empower business customers and partners to configure strong security controls, including different assurance levels and multi-factor authentication (MFA) preferences. This flexibility enables organisations to onboard business customers and partners with security requirements that may differ from those of the organisation.

Is Building a B2B Identity Right for You?

After understanding the benefits of B2B identity, businesses must decide whether to build their solution or adopt a purpose-built B2B identity solution. While building an in-house solution offers full customisation and perfectly fits with existing business applications, this approach has some downsides.

Before building applications from scratch businesses need to consider -that the time to develop and maintain identity solutions adds to time-to-market and the cost to build capabilities internally requires significant investment in development and support. Additionally, identity management and security demand specialised knowledge. If these challenges are overwhelming, existing B2B identity solutions offer a faster, more cost-effective path to success offering seamless onboarding, delegated administration, custom authentication flows and customisable user experience.

The absence of a fit-for-purpose B2B toolset and process can hinder business growth through inefficient onboarding, high administrative costs, poor user experiences, and increased security risks. Incorporating a B2B identity solution addresses these challenges, providing businesses with a competitive edge by streamlining operations and reducing costs. Early adoption of B2B identity solutions offers an opportunity to stay ahead of competitors and enhance business agility.