Thales acquires OneWelcome to strengthen data privacy

Thales has announced an agreement to acquire OneWelcome, a European leader in the fast-growing market of Customer Identity and Access Management, for €100mn.

With this acquisition, Thales will offer an Identity Platform that will allow organisations of all sizes to manage internal and external identities. 

According to both of the companies, OneWelcome’s digital identity lifecycle management capabilities will complement Thales’s existing Identity services (secure credential enrollment, issuance and management, Know Your Customer etc) in order to offer the most comprehensive identity platform in the market.  

Philippe Vallée, Executive Vice-President, Digital Identity and Security at Thales said: “The acquisition of OneWelcome is fully aligned with our expansion strategy within the cybersecurity space. OneWelcome’s talents and expertise in customer identity and access management complements and strengthens our authentication and data privacy portfolio as well as our plan to provide a trusted and frictionless digital experience. 

“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.”

Protecting millions of users 

Headquartered in the Netherlands, OneWelcome provides cloud-based customer identity and access management for highly regulated industries.

With over 100 employees and customers across Europe, OneWelcome says it is experiencing strong growth of over 30% year-on-year. It protects tens of millions of European identities for lighthouse customers like Malakoff Humanis, PostNL and the European Central Bank. Thales plans to leverage this regional expertise to address the global need for enhanced identity and data privacy management.

Danny de Vreeze CEO of OneWelcome, said: “Customer Identity – or CIAM – is a solution tailored for any organisation with a digital presence that need to securely manage external identities and provide intuitive access to their online services.  We have a state-of-the-art service that is used by European customers to connect and protect millions of users. Our highly motivated team is thrilled to expand our product leadership into new markets using the global reach of Thales.”