If you’re living in Singapore, you’ve probably encountered NTUC Enterprise in one way or another. The group operates a wide range of services, from FairPrice Group’s supermarkets and eateries, to NTUC First Campus preschools, and NTUC Health eldercare and clinics. In total, NTUC Enterprise has 10 social enterprises that offer an integrated suite of products and services for inter-generational families. 

Over the past two years, NTUC Enterprise has undergone a broad digital transformation, spearheaded by NE Digital. This group sought to streamline communications and form a better understanding of NTUC Enterprise’s customers, but they quickly ran into a serious issue: customers had separate accounts for each social enterprise’s service, and these silos detracted from the UX and prevented the team from forming a single, holistic view of their customers.

NTUC Enterprise needed an identity solution that would migrate all of this scattered data into a single profile for each customer, all while obeying Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA).

Automatic Migration for 1.2M FairPrice Customers

Winson Lim, VP of Core Product Development at NE Digital, describes the push for data consolidation in terms of customer experience. “If I’m a customer, I might have an account with NTUC FairPrice, one with NTUC First Campus, and another one with NTUC Income,” Winson says. “And even if I just need to change my address, I would need to have multiple contact points to update my profile. We also realized that we don’t have a single location to find out that someone is a very valuable customer for NTUC Enterprise, and we want to treat them like a VIP.” Says Winson, “NTUC Enterprise’s in-house identity solution did not have the capability to do that linkage.”

According to Winson, “our North Star for getting Auth0 was to build up this single customer view.” Auth0’s API enabled the NE Digital team to start forming this view by connecting to their vendors, even though they all had different authentication systems.

Their first use case for Auth0 was with FairPrice online grocery, which has 1,200,000 users. To make the migration from NTUC Enterprise’s legacy systems to Auth0 as painless as possible, NTUC Enterprise opted for automatic migration. “Rather than doing a one-time migration where there are a lot of edge cases we have to handle, we migrate user-by-user,” Winson explains. “When the user is trying to log in or sign up, we migrate their data to Auth0 automatically.”

The whole process to “go-live” for FairPrice took just two months, and NTUC Enterprise was able to customize the process with Auth0’s Rules. Ryne Cheow, NE Digital’s Technical Lead, elaborate on the partnership. “Auth0 has been an incredible catalyst on the digital identity transformation in NTUC FairPrice and is already impacting our customers’ experience today.”

Saving Over $500,000 per Year in Developer Costs

According to Winson, Auth0’s developer-friendly solution saves NTUC Enterprise valuable resources. “If we wanted to build our own identity solution, it’d be a team of five to six people, and building up such a team today could cost us over half a million dollars.”

But Winson is quick to note that Auth0’s savings go far beyond those up-front costs. “It’s not just the five or six people building authentication; it’s the audit on the extra security checks, the monitors, making sure the functional checks are still there,” he says.

Auth0 also helps reduce operational friction between teams. “Auth0 provides mobile and front-end SDKs for us to consume the services easily,” Winson says. “That way, our front-end, mobile, iOS, and Android developers can just use the SDKs rather than creating it. Because if you’re creating the interface, you need to talk to developers in different teams, asking what works for them.”

Improving Visibility Without Sacrificing Privacy

NTUC Enterprise wanted to take advantage of cloud features to unite their workforce and customers but had to abide by PDPA. This law makes it difficult to store the personal data of Singapore’s residents in public cloud servers outside the country. The solution was Auth0’s Private Cloud. “Without the Private Cloud option,” Winson says, “we would have spent all our budget to ensure the security portion is taken care of.”

NTUC Enterprise is also using Auth0 to improve customer service. “Auth0’s dedicated admin portal empowers our customer service officers to serve our customers’ problems faster,” Winson says. “They can get really enriched looks at our customers and send password reset links immediately instead of having to guide them through the process over the phone.” Since NTUC Enterprise implemented Auth0, the average resolution time for customer support tickets has dropped from four days to one.

Now, NTUC Enterprise can focus on delivering more value to its customers by uniting each of them under a single identity. “This single customer platform we built uses Auth0 as a foundation,” Winson says. “Our end goal is to have all our customers on Auth0.”