Basic Value Propositions for FIDM

Economics of scale: The reuse of credentials shares the cost of provisioning and supporting credentials and their use.

Information Security and privacy: The reuse of credentials makes it feasible to have strong credentials and procedures in place to protect identity-related security objectives. As a result it is possible to make processes available on-line where the risk would have been too high without strong protection in place. Another benefit is to reduce identity-related fraud.

Business enabling: Whereas applications with a high value per transaction or per user usually can afford their isolated IDM, long-tail applications cannot. The availability of better price/performance credentials will enable new applications.

Improving existing processes: Many on-line applications loose prospective customers or users when they require registration. Confirmation mails lost in SPAM-filters are a frequent cause. Instant identification of a user would result in a higher ratio of users continuing through the full process.

Identity Provider Business Model

IdP charges opex to federation

The IdP (which might be some organizational unit of a participant of a federation) charges its operational expenses to the federation. Expenses are paid by users or providers by some allocation code based on users, transactions or similar measured quantities.

IdP charges service to service providers

IdPs charge use oriented (or risk based) fees that may be subscription or transaction-based to service providers.

IdP charges service to users

Usually bundled with some application, the end user pays the IdP services to obtain access to some application or communication service. 

IdP charges service to government

The government may want to establish a eID system for eGovernment, eHealth and consumer applications and pays for the IdP services.

Federation Operator Business Model

FOs are usually not-for-profit entities sponsored by membership fees from providers.

pending

Attribute providers, service brokers, underwriters