For the 14^th time, the most outstanding projects have been reviewed and awarded by a panel of KuppingerCole’s analysts. Several categories had more than one winner, highlighting the exceptional quality of the projects nominated this year. “Our winners managed to brilliantly meet the challenges brought up by the pandemic and the quick upsurge of digitization it caused,” Martin Kuppinger, Principal Analyst at KuppingerCole Analysts, confided during the event.

The category Customer & Citizen Authentication welcomed a large panel of exceptional applicants this year. Three of them showed equal excellency, while distinguishing themselves with diverse and innovative solutions. German retailer Schwarz Gruppe was rewarded for its loyalty program, for which it created a unified identity across different channels, successfully linking both digital and physical worlds. BancoEstado was applauded for efficiently increasing security for the bank’s 10m+ mobile banking customers and migrating approximately 7m customers to a cloud-based IAM solution in Chile. Nationale Nederlanden’s awarded project provided the bank with a centralized and unified Consumer IAM solution, allowing the various business units to create their own customized rapid onboarding processes which are compliant with the strict local regulatory requirements such as GDPR, KYC, AML, and PSD2.

In the category Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identity, the National Health Service (NHS) in the United-Kingdom was acclaimed for its staff passport program allowing pre-employment checks for new hires and employees being transferred between NHS institutions in under 5 minutes, eliminating a lengthy manual process while maintaining the level of assurance, security, and privacy. The Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques (SITA) was rewarded for its implementation of a verifiable credential solution for safe travel in the country of Aruba. With the use of a decentralized network, travelers can present secure health credentials to airlines, hotels, and hospitality partners in a private manner.

The award in the category Enterprise IAM went to both Airbus and ASEA Brown Boveri (ABB) for respectively implementing projects that overhauled a streamlining identity management across multi-infrastructure and multi-location environments. Both took on the challenge of giving fast access to resources to user identities while ensuring the safety of services and data. ABB was commended for the speed of its implementation in a complex environment and its ServiceNow integration while Airbus performed IAM modernization at huge scale in a highly regulated industry.

OPA & REGO was awarded in the category Future Technology and Standards for their breakthrough approach offering a policy engine able to unify policy enforcement across the cloud stack. It also introduced a high-level declarative policy language, REGO, having its own policy model and API for every product and service.

In the category Identity Fabric & IDaaS, Eurafric Information was awarded  for successfully creating one single customer identity for a multinational financial organization while respecting its strong KYC and regulatory requirements. Their solution was implemented in 32 countries and 30 organisations in less than 2 years. Bovemij was applauded for developing a single digital mobility service platform providing businesses with high identity assurance levels. Since early 2021, 25.000 B2B accounts and 5.000.000 B2C accounts have been onboarded – those numbers are expected to double soon.