What is B2B Identity and Access Management (IAM)?
B2B Identity and Access Management provides a secure, scalable way to onboard, authenticate and manage external users such as partners, suppliers, and business customers, ensuring appropriate access, reducing IT effort, and enabling trusted collaboration across the extended enterprise.
B2B IAM Challenges
When access extends beyond your enterprise, complexity grows fast
External business collaborators drive business growth, but every new connection adds risk and friction.
Onboarding that slows you down
31 %
wait more than one business day to receive login details or access
Limited visibility, growing risk
61 %
worry about outdated permissions lingering in systems
Disconnected systems, frustrated users
96 %
of third-party users face login issues with partner systems, wasting an average of 48 minutes per month
To fix these gaps, organizations need a unified approach that automates external business user management, aligns access policies with partner trust levels, and scales easily as ecosystems grow.
2025 Thales
Digital Trust Index
Understanding How Third-Party Access Shapes Digital Trust
The 2025 Thales Digital Trust Index Third-Party Edition reveals gaps in third-party access, identity management, and security, highlighting risks and trust challenges in B2B.
Solution
A simpler way to secure collaboration at scale
This approach is delivered through our eXtended Enterprise Access solution.
Managing access for partners, suppliers and corporate customers shouldn’t be time-consuming for your team. B2B Identity and Access Management from Thales simplifies every stage—from onboarding and identity verification to day-to-day management and compliance—so your organization can move faster and stay secure across its entire ecosystem.
As a B2B IAM leader, Thales caters to all your B2B user groups, delivering unmatched security, scalability, and ease of use for seamless collaboration across your B2B ecosystem.
Here’s how we help you simplify complexity and scale with confidence:
Accelerate the entire user lifecycle
Automate onboarding, role changes, and offboarding for partners, vendors, and contractors—keeping access accurate and up to date with less IT intervention.
Smarter self-service
Empower business owners and partner managers to handle day-to-day user management securely, freeing IT to focus on strategic priorities.
Enhanced protection and compliance
Safeguard collaboration with fine-grained authorization, strong authentication and centralized audit trails that reduce exposure and simplify compliance
Consistent oversight
Gain full visibility of every external identity and access policy across your environment—so you always know who has access, to what and for how long
Flexible integration
Connect seamlessly to your enterprise technology stack with APIs and event-driven workflows that adapt to each organization’s maturity
A gateway to seamless B2B collaboration
Enterprises encounter persistent access and collaboration challenges among partners, suppliers, brokers and other third-party users. Our B2B IAM solution transforms this situation from chaos to calm, simplifying access while enhancing security across your entire B2B network.
HOW THALES CAN HELP
Key capabilities of third-party and B2B identity management
Modernize your B2B identity management
Within your organization, modernize your B2B identity management systems to effectively streamline access control, ensuring secure and efficient collaboration among teams, while also enforcing consistent authorization policies at scale.
Delegated user management
Give partners the right level of control and accountability. Empower external organizations to oversee and manage their own employees while you maintain oversight and save administrative costs.
User journey orchestration
Provide a personalized onboarding experience based on the user persona. Simplify lifecycle management by automating provisioning across diverse backend and source systems.
Externalized authorization
Securely grant or restrict partner access to resources, data, and services based on predefined policies. Easily deal with ethical walls that companies might want to establish.
Access management
Manage all different applications and systems. The administration, reporting, (de)provisioning of access can be automated with better compliance.
Consent & preference management
Allows for collection of consent before non-employees can access a company's resources.
Improve B2B security
Liberate your B2B relationships from security concerns and foster deeper collaboration. By leveraging essential Identity and Access Management (IAM) components in the B2B login and verification processes, you can enable enhanced security measures and facilitate seamless cooperation among partners.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Bolster trust with additional security layers, curbing unauthorized access for your external partners.
Strong customer authentication (SCA)
For regulated sectors like BFSI, secure systems, ensuring only authorized external identities gain access, reinforcing trust in your partnerships.
Identity verification
Proof and validate the identities of your third parties and corporate customers online with KYC requirements.
Risk-based authentication (RBA)
Adapt security measures dynamically, safeguarding external identities against evolving threats, and nurturing a secure ecosystem.
Thales named an overall leader
Find the product or service that best meets your needs, and learn why KuppingerCole named Thales a Market Leader, Overall Leader, and Innovation Leader in Access Management
When it comes to identity management, B2B resides at the most complex end of the spectrum. That’s because there is no one-size-fits-all solution. We are not merely discussing the lifecycle management of a single type of identity, such as customers or employees. Instead, we are faced with the challenge of effectively managing an array of diverse identities, from partners to gig workers and many more, each vital to your business, and each with its unique lifecycle and engagement requirements.
Recommended resources
Frequently asked questions
These terms all refer to managing access for external organizations, but they highlight different use cases. Partner IAM and Third-Party IAM both describe giving business partners, suppliers, or vendors secure and governed access to systems—they’re essentially part of the same category. B2B CIAM, meanwhile, extends Customer IAM principles to business clients, offering entire organizations a seamless, branded access experience instead of focusing on individual consumers.
B2B IAM brings all these together in one framework, designed to handle every external identity—whether it’s a partner, supplier or business customer. Thales B2B IAM takes it further with Delegated User Management, Identity Verification and Consent & Preference Management, giving enterprises the flexibility to collaborate securely and confidently across their entire ecosystem, without requiring integrating capabilities from other vendors.
Traditional Workforce IAM is designed for employees who are part of the organization, operating within a single security perimeter and managed under one directory. Customer IAM (CIAM), on the other hand, focuses on individual consumers — optimizing for convenience, personalization, and marketing insights rather than complex access relationships.
B2B IAM is built for something entirely different: managing access forexternal organizations—such as partners, suppliers, distributors, and contractors—who need secure but controlled access to your systems. Unlike repurposed workforce or CIAM tools, B2B IAM should handle the complexities of multi-organization relationships and complex hierarchies of users, roles and entitlements.
Thales B2B IAM gives organizations the flexibility to connect and collaborate with partners at any stage of IAM maturity—from those without an identity system to those with advanced infrastructures—all within a single, configurable platform.
Whether partners need to be fully managed or integrated through their own systems, the solution can be configured to each relationship, enabling seamless onboarding, consistent access control, and scalable governance. Organizations can define the level of control they require—centralized, delegated or a combination—while maintaining a unified framework for policy, auditing and security across every partner interaction.
For smaller partner or supplier organizations, implementing federated access can be too costly or complex. Self-service provides a practical alternative—allowing external users to request access, reset credentials, and manage their profiles without IT involvement. When someone forgets a username or password, they can resolve it instantly through secure recovery options. These capabilities reduce service desk workload, cut operational costs and keep collaboration running smoothly.
The Consent & Preference Management module ensures data privacy obligations are met by capturing, tracking and honoring user consent in line with regulations such as GDPR and other data protection laws. Delegated User Management gives each partner or supplier responsibility for managing their own users and access rights—ensuring that permissions remain accurate, auditable and up to date. B2B IAM also supports identity verification and strong multifactor authentication, enabling organizations to meet requirements for secure user onboarding, verified digital identities, and continuous access assurance under standards like GDPR, ISO 27001 and NIS2. Together, these capabilities reduce IT overhead while strengthening accountability and compliance across your extended ecosystem.
Looking to manage other types of identities?
Workforce
Enable organizational digital transformation and empower your digital workforce
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Gig Workers
Enable secure access for gig workers, contractors, seasonal staff, and guest users
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