Realizing Single Sign-On for Insurance

We often describe the Exchange as a platform based upon 3 primary building blocks:

• Collaboration
• Data
• Security

One of the main security challenges facing the insurance industry is user authentication.    Agencies and their users are forced to manage multiple credentials across each of their carrier portals and vendor applications, including the Insurance Exchange.   Each set of credentials has a unique set of security rules for defining username/ID and password, password expiration, etc.  While these credentials can be maintained in a variety of applications, often they’re maintained via yellow sticky notes around a user’s monitor.   These sticky notes or their equivalent are not only an obvious security risk, but  represent an additional point of friction and “ease of use” challenge as users transition from one application to another and experience multiple login pages during their already busy days.

To address this challenge, a variety of industry organizations have come together to participate in ID Federation.  This group is building a Trust Framework for the insurance industry to provide “common legal and technical standards which will remove the need for IDs and passwords while increasing security and the ease of doing business with one another.”

LexisNexis has enthusiastically joined this effort as a participant, helping to define these standards.  In addition, we have moved forward with plans to implement a pilot for single-sign with a leading broker using Federated Identity in 2012 by leveraging this new Trust Framework.  This solution will enable broker users to move seamlessly between the Insurance Exchange and their internal systems such as their agency management systems.  In addition to providing user efficiency within the Insurance Exchange, Federated Identity will lessen the burden on IT by consolidating authentication management of multiple systems to a single source.

Federated Identity is the rare security requirement that actually reduces friction for the user and facilitates ease of doing business.   What carriers or vendors wouldn’t want to support this initiative?