"Respecting customer privacy preferences and providing customer confidentiality are vital to establishing and maintaining a trusting relationship," said Christopher Formant, Executive Vice President, Global Financial Services, BearingPoint. "Customer identity management allows companies to get to know their customers, protect customer privacy and at the same time provide information available on those customers to employees and in some circumstances, business partners. Customer identity management can help companies to transform their business models from an account-centric to customer-centric focus."

The Customer Identity Management offering addresses a fundamental issue facing the industry: companies want to know more about their customers without violating privacy laws or intruding upon a customer's own sense of privacy. CRM systems have allowed companies to gain more information on customer preferences and interests. Risk management systems, meanwhile are used to both mitigate company and customer exposure that rise from forging deeper relationships.

"Customer Identity Management can also help capture patterns of fraudulent behavior of customers and establish internal controls to support compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley Act, data protection provisions of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and the USA Patriot Act," added Alex Berson, a Senior Manager with BearingPoint.

CIM systems help companies comply with existing and emerging regulatory requirements, create a true digital identity of customers and prospects, help gain a deeper understanding of their customer, help build trusted relationships between the company and their customers, and thus deliver increased value to customers.

Berson noted that Customer Identity Management comprises the business processes and infrastructure to create, maintain and use digital identities and the associated relationships. CIM is both a business strategy and a framework for organising disparate data and the set of technologies and processes to manage that information.