John Jellema In Sweden, just as across the Nordics, digital identity is pervasive in our daily lives. What we do, how we buy things, how we use both private and public services and how we protect our digital identities relies on our ability to use strong authentication.
Ubisecure helps organisations leverage online identities for authentication to their own services. Our Identity Platform (Identity and Access Management) has been in use in the Nordics (and across Europe) for a variety of business and government organisations as long as strong online identity management has been possible. To support our Swedish customers, we offer integration with the most popular identity authentication methods for the Swedish market – BankID and Freja eID.
If your business interacts with partners, customers and/or residents/citizens digitally, you should consider the best authentication method(s) to reduce fraud while helping your customers feel confident when using your service. Making BankID and Freja eID available as authentication methods, for example to make purchases or to view information, is a great way to show your customers that your business cares about information security and your users’ seamless experience within your service(s).
Ubisecure’s Identity Platform can help integrate your application in a standards-compliant manner to Sweden’s key authenticators. If your business is more complex, for example if you have lots of applications – perhaps even some for customers (B2C) and others for partners (B2B) – we can help you make a common integration point and use Sweden’s strong authenticators to ensure your services are secure.
Swedish BankID
Swedish BankID is the leading electronic identification method in Sweden. BankID has been developed by a number of large banks for use by members of the public, authorities and companies in order to leverage the banks’ strongly assured identities of their users (resulting from existing Know Your Customer practices) for strong user authentication in other online services. The BankID network includes Danske Bank, ICA Banken, Länsförsäkringar Bank, Nordea, SEB, Skandiabanken, Sparbanken Syd, Svenska Handelsbanken, Swedbank and Ålandsbanken. 8 million people use BankID on a regular basis for a wide variety of private and public services.
BankID services vary from online and mobile banking, e-trade to tax declaration and are provided by government, municipality, banks and companies. BankID is used both for identification as well as signing (for example, digitally signing contracts). According to Swedish law, and within the European Union, BankID is an advanced signature and a signature made with a BankID is legally binding.
The customer’s identification is guaranteed by the bank issuing the BankID. Authorities, companies and other organisations must check the validity of the customer’s identity and signature. BankID is available on smart card, computers, mobile phones and tablet devices.
Freja eID
Freja eID is a mobile app that represents your identity in digital form as an electronic identity (eID). Users with a Freja eID can consent to sharing verified attributes that are required by digital services – including name, age, or social security number. Within the My Pages space in the app, users can see their history of what they have shared and who they have shared it with, ensuring visibility over any suspicious activity and providing transparency around data sharing.
When an individual uses Freja eID for a number of services (out of the possible more than 200 already integrated services), the Freja eID app then essentially acts as a password manager for these services, since the user’s identity credentials are transferred directly from the app in order to gain authorised access. As with BankID, Freja eID also supports legally-binding electronic signatures.
CIBA
Ubisecure has advanced extensibility for external authenticators using CIBA ‘Client initiated Backchannel Authentication (Flow)’, meaning we (and even you) can continue to add CIBA-based authenticators for use with our Identity Platform. Find out more in our CIBA explainer blog and our 2021.2 software release blog.
Get in touch to find out how Ubisecure can help support your authentication goals with Swedish BankID, Freja eID or a whole host of other digital identity provider options to suit your service user expectations and regional/regulatory context.
About The Author: John Jellema
As VP Product Management, John is responsible for ensuring Ubisecure’s ongoing development of its Identity Platform, optimising the feature development while driving generational change across the IAM delivery platform. Since joining Ubisecure in 2017, John has refocused the cloud and on-premises delivered services to fulfil customer expectations across the Nordics.
Prior to joining Ubisecure, John worked for Verizon as a Global Security Product Manager, developing and managing its DDoS platform around the world. With more than 20 years experience in global product management, John is passionate about seamless technology integration. Standing on the shoulders of giants permits us to achieve greatness today and into the future.
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