By Mikkel Hald, 15/10/26
The digital procurement and finance platform Acentio has now joined WAYF as a service provider. This enables research and education institutions in Denmark and the North Atlantic that use Acentio to give their staff access to the platform using their familiar institutional login – without having to establish and maintain separate single sign-on integrations.
Acentio is a digital platform for managing and automating procurement and finance processes in public and private organisations. The platform supports the entire process from procurement to payment, including contract management, e-commerce, supplier collaboration and invoice processing. Among its aims are reducing manual administration and providing organisations with greater transparency and control over their procurement and financial transactions.
UCL University College will be the first institution in the WAYF community to make use of the new login option. UCL staff will thus be able to access Acentio using their existing institutional identity rather than having to use a separate login for the platform.
For UCL, the connection means that the institution does not have to establish or maintain its own technical single sign-on connection to Acentio. At the same time, it can reuse its existing identity management, allowing access to the platform to follow staff members' digital identities at the institution.
But WAYF is more than – and is not primarily – a shared technical infrastructure. First and foremost, WAYF is a community of trust in which institutions and service providers are governed by common rules for the management and exchange of digital identities and the processing of personal data. Participants can therefore base their collaboration on a common framework rather than each having to establish the necessary trust from scratch. In other words, it is not only the login integrations that scale – trust does too.
At the same time, the shared infrastructure supports the institutions' digital sovereignty: WAYF is based on open, internationally established standards and does not require login products from particular vendors or proprietary integrations. Institutions retain control of their own identity infrastructure and can, for example, change their login system without having to reconfigure their connections to Acentio and other services in WAYF. This reduces their dependence on individual technology vendors.
The connection also brings benefits for Acentio: By implementing WAYF as the sector's shared SSO interface, the company can now offer federated login to individual institutional customers across the sector with minimal additional integration work – without having to accommodate the particular login product used by each customer or any subsequent change of login system. The WAYF integration also provides straightforward access to authentication from institutions abroad, for example in Sweden and Norway.
Institutions that are Acentio customers and wish to access the service using their internal login should contact Acentio to have the existing login option enabled.