This article was based on the interview with Haider Iqbal, Director, Identity & Access Management at Thales by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
As a marketing leader, you orchestrate a vast ecosystem. It’s a complex network of agencies, technology vendors, consultants, and freelance creatives, all working in concert to bring your brand’s vision to life. We spend fortunes meticulously crafting every touchpoint of the customer journey, optimizing for a frictionless, delightful experience. Yet, we often overlook the very first interaction we have with the partners who help us build these experiences: the digital welcome mat we lay out for them. This initial handshake—granting access to our systems, data, and platforms—is frequently a source of immense friction, frustration, and, more troublingly, a significant security risk.
This isn’t merely an IT issue to be relegated to a support ticket. It’s a fundamental brand and operational challenge. The confidence and speed with which your partners can integrate into your workflows directly impacts your team’s agility and overall go-to-market velocity. When nearly one in three third-party users must wait days for access to critical systems, as research from Thales shows, we are not just losing time; we are eroding the foundation of a successful partnership before it even begins. This is the agility paradox: our quest for speed is often undermined by our own internal processes, creating a drag on the very collaborations we need to thrive. Building a foundation of what we call “digital trust” is no longer a nice-to-have, but a strategic imperative.
The Total Experience: Your Partners are an Extension of Your Brand
We have become adept at discussing the customer experience (CX) and, more recently, the employee experience (EX). The most forward-thinking leaders understand that a happy, empowered workforce is a prerequisite for delivering exceptional customer service. However, there’s a critical third dimension that is often left out of the equation: the partner experience. When your marketing agency can’t access the campaign analytics platform or your new MarTech vendor is stuck in an onboarding loop, the ripple effects are felt throughout the organization and, ultimately, by the customer. Haider Iqbal argues that we must adopt a more holistic view, recognizing that our external partners are an integral part of our brand delivery mechanism.
“Your business partners, whether those might be your distributors, your agents, sometimes even your suppliers as well, they become a really crucial part of the overall experience that you deliver to your consumers or customers… your partners and your suppliers, they actually become an extension of your brand that way as well. So in order to establish that trust with your partners, you need to make sure that the access that you’re providing to them is actually seamless to begin with.”
This reframing is critical. Your partner’s experience with your internal systems is not a back-office concern; it’s a direct reflection of your brand’s efficiency, security, and respect for their time. A clunky, slow, and insecure onboarding process sends a clear message: we don’t value our partnership. Conversely, a seamless, secure, and swift access experience builds immediate confidence and sets the stage for a productive relationship. Iqbal points to the concept of “total experience,” a term that encapsulates this interconnectedness. To win with customers, you must first win with your employees and your partners. For marketing leaders, this means advocating for systems and processes that treat partner access with the same level of care and design thinking as a consumer-facing login portal.
The Tyranny of the Password and the Promise of a Holistic Approach
If there is a universal symbol for digital friction, it is the password reset button. Thales’ research indicates that a staggering 96% of third-party users face login issues, a statistic that should alarm any leader responsible for operational efficiency. This isn’t just an annoyance; it’s a productivity sinkhole. Users waste, on average, 48 minutes a month simply trying to log in and access systems. When you consider that, according to Iqbal, nearly half of all users accessing corporate assets can be external, the scale of this lost productivity becomes immense. The traditional solution—passwords—is the root of the problem, and the move toward a passwordless future is the most logical solution. Yet, many organizations are taking a fragmented approach.
“One of the things that we recommend to large organizations is when they’re thinking about going passwordless to get rid of all the problems that we just described, they end up thinking in a very myopic sense to just focus on either their employees or their consumers… If you’re building a good user experience of getting rid of passwords for your workforce and for your consumers, why not do it for your partners and suppliers as well? Take a holistic approach to looking at getting rid of passwords.”
The technology to solve this, like Passkeys promoted by the FIDO Alliance, is mature and readily available. It replaces the fallible, frustrating password with more secure and seamless methods like biometrics. The barrier is no longer technology, but strategy. As Iqbal points out, organizations often implement these modern solutions for their internal teams or their customers but leave their partners stranded in a legacy environment. A holistic strategy recognizes that the same benefits of speed, security, and user satisfaction that apply to employees and customers are just as critical, if not more so, for the partners who operate at the intersection of your business. This is a clear opportunity for marketing leaders to champion a unified identity and access strategy that benefits the entire business ecosystem.
Solving the “Lingering Access” Problem by Delegating Trust
Perhaps the most glaring security risk highlighted in the conversation is the issue of “lingering access.” The data shows that over half of users retain access to a host organization’s systems long after the project is completed or the relationship has ended. In a world of interconnected MarTech stacks and shared customer data, this is not just a loose end; it’s an open door for a potential data breach. A disgruntled former contractor or an employee from a past agency partner could still have the keys to your kingdom. While it seems like a straightforward problem to solve, the manual processes of de-provisioning access across dozens or hundreds of partners are often overlooked, creating a massive, silent vulnerability. The solution, Iqbal suggests, is both elegant and logical: delegate the responsibility to those who have the most current information.
“Why don’t you as the host organization delegate the access management capabilities to your partner organization? …Give them user-friendly tools that allow you to say, ‘Hey, you know what, Tom or John… they’re still working in my organization, but Jane just left the organization.’ So, hey, I can revoke the access because [the host] doesn’t know that Jane has left. I think that’s one way of putting the onus on your partners themselves because they have much more better intimacy in terms of who actually should be having access.”
This concept of delegated administration is a powerful shift in mindset. Instead of your IT or security team trying to maintain a constantly changing roster of external users, you empower a trusted contact at the partner organization to manage their own team’s access. They know instantly when someone joins or leaves their team. By providing them with simple, non-technical tools to add or revoke privileges, you close the security gap in real-time. This not only dramatically improves your security posture but also builds a deeper level of trust and shared responsibility with your partners. It transforms them from passive users into active stewards of your shared digital environment.
The Future is Now: Preparing for the Age of Agentic AI
If managing human identities across a partner network seems complex, the next wave of technology is set to multiply that complexity exponentially. The rise of agentic AI—autonomous agents that can perform tasks, access data, and even negotiate contracts on behalf of an organization—introduces an entirely new category of “users” that need to be managed, secured, and audited. This isn’t a far-off science fiction concept; these interactions are beginning to happen today. As marketing leaders, we are at the forefront of AI adoption, and we must also be at the forefront of understanding its security implications.
“The whole identity and access management layer becomes so much more important, right? Because if you don’t have an inventory of all the agentic AI identities in your infrastructure, what you can’t see, you can’t protect… Having visibility on the ecosystem of agents that you have in your ecosystem and your extended ecosystem, and then being able to grant granular access rights to them as well becomes absolutely crucial.”
This is the next frontier of digital trust. How do you authenticate an AI agent from a partner organization? How do you grant it the precise level of access it needs to analyze a dataset without exposing PII? How do you revoke its access instantly when its task is complete? The principles we’ve discussed—seamless onboarding, passwordless authentication, delegated administration, and granular access control—will become even more critical in a world populated by both human and machine identities. As Iqbal warns, the complexity could increase tenfold, or a hundredfold. Preparing for this future means building a robust and flexible identity and access management foundation today.
The way we manage our partners’ access to our digital worlds is a direct reflection of our brand’s maturity and a leading indicator of our ability to remain agile. The friction, delays, and security gaps that plague so many partner onboarding processes are not minor inconveniences; they are strategic liabilities. They slow down innovation, introduce unnecessary risk, and damage the trust that is essential for high-performing collaborations. Moving beyond this requires a strategic shift, championed by leaders who see the bigger picture.
This means embracing a “total experience” mindset that values the partner journey as much as the customer journey. It means advocating for holistic, passwordless solutions that serve the entire ecosystem, not just siloed user groups. And it means preparing for a future where the definition of a “user” is expanding to include the autonomous AI agents that will soon become indispensable partners in their own right. The digital handshake we offer our partners is the first, and perhaps most important, step in building an agile, secure, and truly trusted brand ecosystem. Getting it right is no longer optional.
