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

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

“Our member base includes everyone from car lovers to people with bicycles,” Rannveig Aarnes, Technical Lead at NAF, 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 customized 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 Auth0 to Centralize Identity

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

NAF decided to implement Auth0’s platform with its membership app first, migrating users with an automatic migration approach and working closely with Auth0 support to ensure a smooth transition. With the first use case online, NAF began integrating Auth0’s 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 Auth0 for single page application, added a new application, did a little troubleshooting, and it was done.”

NAF is also leveraging the extensibility capabilities of Auth0’s 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 Auth0, 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 Increases During the Last Year

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 centralized 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 Auth0 will make it easy. 

“Auth0 works for native apps, web sites, and everywhere else we need it,” Aarnes says. “It helps us in our digital transformation.”