Thales is set to acquire OneWelcome, a customer identity and access management company, for €100 million (£84 million).
OneWelcome provides cloud-based customer identity and access management for highly regulated industries, helping them to securely connect customers as well as business partners to their online services, said the company. Headquartered in the Netherlands, OneWeb counts on customers like Malakoff Humanis, PostNL, and the European Central Bank.
Thales is aiming to use the company’s regional expertise to address the global need for enhanced identity and privacy management. It expects OneWelcome to meet the increasing need for convenient and secure access, as well as data privacy, which is essential in regulated markets, like GDPR compliance for instance.
The company underlined that one of the key OneWelcome’s abilities is to grant users greater control of their information and data, across any platform or application as it helps manage their passwords and consent preferences.
“OneWelcome’s talents and expertise in customer identity and access management complement and strengthens our authentication and data privacy portfolio as well as our plan to provide a trusted and frictionless digital experience,” said Philippe Vallée, executive vice-president of Digital Identity and Security at Thales. “Nowadays, as we see a rapid increase in amount of data, cloud migrations, and new compliance mandates, it’s essential to offer secure, adaptive and convenient solutions that help our customers in both private and public sector to classify, protect, and control the access to their sensitive data regardless of where it resides.”
Through the acquisition, Thales plans to offer a comprehensive Identity Platform which will allow customers to manage internal and external identities. It hopes this will help them to bring new businesses online fast, improving operational efficiency and customer experience along the way, while meeting regulatory compliance.
OneWelcome will join the Thales Digital Identity and Security global business unit. Its digital identity lifecycle management capabilities will complement Thales’s existing identity services to offer a comprehensive identity platform, said Thales.
Thales added that in 2022, it plans to hire 11,000 people worldwide, including 1,000 in cyber security. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to be completed during the second half of 2022.
