NAF profits from increased demand with seamless, centralised authentication

Norwegians have relied on roadside and legal assistance from NAF for almost 100 years. But most of the time, their members needed to speak to a representative to access those services. So NAF began their digital transformation so members could manage their own accounts in "My Page.”

NAF has expanded the scope of their digital services to include a number of web apps and mobile apps — each with their own authentication. However, this approach made it difficult for NAF to provide the personalisation their diverse members desired.

“Our member base includes everyone from car lovers to people with bicycles,” Rannveig Aarnes, Technical Lead, explains. “But our old login solution made it difficult to deliver relevant information to members across all of our services. We needed a single sign-on (SSO) solution to solve that.”

Fast product development leads NAF to investigate SaaS solutions

NAF’s former authentication system managed identity for each application separately. In addition to offering customised content, security is also a major factor for NAF. With only a handful of in-house developers, NAF wasn’t confident they had the in-house expertise to build and maintain the solution they needed, so they decided to look for SaaS solutions helping to solve their requirements.

“We want our developers to focus on our core business. So we decided a SaaS solution would be best for us in the long run because we wouldn’t have to worry about maintenance, security updates, etc.,” Aarnes explains.

NAF selects Customer Identity Cloud to centralise Identity

NAF’s developers tested identity solutions from a variety of IDaaS providers and ultimately decided the Okta Customer Identity Cloud, powered by Auth0, was the right platform for their business. “Okta Customer Identity Cloud had great documentation and APIs, both of which were important to us,” Aarnes says. “Many of our partners were already using the Customer Identity Cloud platform too, which was a good sign it worked.”

NAF decided to implement Okta Customer Identity Cloud with its membership app first, migrating users with an automatic migration approach and working closely with Okta support to ensure a smooth transition. With the first use case online, NAF began integrating the platform with other applications.

“When we built our new website, the login was up and running with little effort,” Aarnes says. “We used the guide from Okta for a single page application, added a new application, did a little troubleshooting, and it was done.”

NAF are also leveraging the extensibility capabilities of Rules engine. To improve the user experience, they add meta data for those users that are members so the members can access other types of content and features when they log in.

Now, when a member logs into any of NAF’s services, they can quickly navigate to any of the others without reauthenticating, which makes it easier for NAF to provide the information their members are looking for. “With Okta Customer Identity Cloud, our members don't need one password on the main site and another one for the membership app,” Aarnes says. “They can use the same login for each application.”

Membership increase shows the value of centralised authentication

The COVID-19 pandemic encouraged more people to travel locally than in previous years, and as a result, NAF saw an increase in the total number of memberships. Fortunately, since they’d already centralised authentication, they had time to improve the value of the services they offered instead of handling access management that was ready in their platform.

“NAF has built a vehicle contract service, where we connect buyers and sellers to simplify the transaction process,” Aarnes explains. “Our team didn't have to worry about the login — they could just focus on getting the most value for the customer.”

In the future, NAF plans to expand the way they use authentication to improve member experience further, including looking into Passwordless logins. As they do, they’re confident Okta Customer Identity Cloud will make it easy.

“Okta Customer Identity Cloud works for native apps, web sites, and everywhere else we need it,” Aarnes says. “It helps us in our digital transformation.”

About Customer

Norges Automobil-Forbund (NAF) is a Norwegian association of car owners, established in 1924. NAF is a member organisation working in areas such as road safety, environmental impacts of transport, accessibility, need for better roads and infrastructure. NAF aims to develop good digital services to make people's everyday lives easier and better. We are proud to have come a long way in building a culture and an agile organisation where the customer's needs are in focus.