PARIS - July 12, 2022 -- Continuing its cybersecurity expansion strategy, Thales announces the signature of an agreement to acquire OneWelcome, a European leader in the fast growing market of Customer Identity and Access Management, for a total consideration of €100 million. OneWelcome’s strong 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.

Headquartered in the Netherlands, OneWelcome provides cloud-based customer identity and access management for highly regulated industries, empowering them to securely connect customers as well as business partners to their online services. Currently, OneWelcome 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.

Indeed, OneWelcome business will particularly address the increasing need for convenient and secure access, as well as data privacy, which is essential in regulated markets, subject to GDPR compliance for instance. To be noted that one of the key OneWelcome’s expertise is to grant users a greater control of their information and data, across any platform or application as it helps manage their passwords and consent preferences.

With this acquisition, Thales will offer a comprehensive Identity Platform that will allow organisations of all sizes to manage internal and external identities, enabling them to bring new businesses online fast, improving operational efficiency and customer experience along the way, while meeting or exceeding regulatory compliance.

With 100+ employees and customers across Europe, OneWelcome is experiencing strong growth of over 30% year-on-year. OneWelcome will join Thales Digital Identity and Security global business unit. Gartner predicts that by 2023[2], 72% of organisations will be rolling out a CIAM initiative, versus 40% in 2020.

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.”

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.”

In 2022, Thales plans to hire 11,000 people worldwide, including 1,000 in cybersecurity.

The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions and is expected to be completed during the second half of 2022.