With businesses growing their digital capabilities at a fast pace to match the growing number of customers online, the interest in customer identity management is bound to increase in the coming year. Like all things evolving in our ever changing world customer identity management is also set to experience changes to address the needs of both the users and businesses.

Here’s a peek at what to expect in the new year, 2016!

Username and passwords will become a thing of the past

The 2015 Accenture Digital Consumer Survey found 76 percent of consumers are interested in using replacements for usernames and passwords and 60 percent find usernames and passwords cumbersome. The survey is tantamount to the running sentiment among the scores of people using the internet through username, passwords. Aiding the people and their wish is a move towards other forms of identification like biometrics, introduced by Apple Touch ID image or voice recognition that seems to be getting the nod for the year 2016. Another popular way of login that is going to continue its prominence is the use of social login.

Global Businesses will store data at multiple locations to comply with international laws

As of Sep. 2015 Russia brought about legislation that makes it mandatory for businesses to storing and collecting of personal data of Russian nationals to be physically stored within Russian borders. With different countries lining out their preferences on how they wish to have personal information related to their nationals collected and stored businesses will have to draw new strategies complying with various regulations.

First party data will be valued while third party data will loose its value

Unlike in the past when data brokers were highly in demand for data about prospects, the future will belong to first party data coming directly from the user in way of data shared on social media platforms or other networks. A Digiday report suggests that in third-party cookie data gender can be wrong 30-35% of the time, a huge deterrent for businesses that pay for the data, while first party data can be a free resource.  A growing trend of cIAM integrations will make the task more easy for the feature of customer profile data that collects and gathers all user related data for the business.

While customer experience will be the focus security will form the base for customer identity management

As the number of data breaches increase in number a common concern for both businesses and users is the misuse of private user data. Users want their data secured but are not willing to go in for elaborate measures of authentication to safeguard their data. On part of businesses it is important to keep the users engaged by providing easy to use ways of authentication. The coming year will see more of biometrics and API based security to keep the user experience simple and convenient while security is kept paramount.