CPA Excellent Partners (CPA) runs a large learning and career-support platform with about 800,000 registered users in total, including CPA Accounting Academy, CPA Learning and CPA Jobs. This article describes why CPA adopted Tactna, the ID lifecycle platform provided by TC3, together with Auth0 for authentication, and how it got there.
01Background and challenge: moving off legacy systems and unifying a fragmented user experience
CPA runs a range of services, from the accounting education service CPA Accounting Academy and the online course service CPA Learning to CPASS Career and CPA Jobs, which support careers and hiring after qualification.
With registered users reaching 800,000, CPA set out a plan to build an integrated authentication platform that lets people use its services (CPA Accounting Academy, CPA Learning, CPA Jobs), each of which had evolved and been optimized separately, with one ID, improving the user experience further, making the most of data, and strengthening its security foundation.
A project was then launched to build the core of an integrated authentication platform that lets people use multiple services with one ID. Leading the project is CTO Toshikazu Ogawa.
02Solution: Tactna's ID merge module breaks through the migration barrier
For CPA, the vision of becoming “the infrastructure for accounting and finance professionals” is a key goal, and working back from it, they set the goal of completing the integrated authentication platform at its core within the fiscal year.
Building everything from scratch was expected to be enormously expensive and slow. What the company chose instead was Auth0, a globally standard authentication platform, and Tactna, which adds flexible user attribute management and user-facing management screens on top of it. The products were chosen mainly for the following reasons.
Why Auth0
- Authentication that follows global standardsComplies by default with standards such as OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0, and keeps up with multi-factor authentication (MFA), passkeys and more.
- Security featuresStrong, global-grade protections such as password encryption and leak countermeasures
Why Tactna
- Keeping scratch development to a minimumUser lifecycle management, profile editing and password resets by users themselves, and other features that would otherwise be built from scratch, including user-facing ones, can be delivered with Tactna's standard features
- ID merge moduleScreens that help users move from an old ID to a new one, and the back-end flow for full ID consolidation, provided as the ID merge module.
How it fits together
Migration
The biggest hurdle in the project was migrating existing users and matching their records. The consolidation proceeded along the following lines.
- Patterns for merging IDsThe team sorted out a complex matrix, such as whether a user already has a shared ID and whether they have used each service, and built an ID merge module that lets users merge into the shared ID themselves.
- Keeping student numbersThe familiar student number was kept as a custom attribute and made usable as a sign-in identifier, so users kept their convenience.
- Phased release (Phase 1 & 2)After a preview release at the end of August, Phase 1 (CPA Accounting Academy) in October and Phase 2 (CPA Learning and CPA Jobs) in November: moving step by step kept the risk of a large-scale migration to a minimum.
For the migration, the project used the screens and back-end logic of Tactna's ID merge module.
03Results: the value of the rollout, in numbers
When the project was proposed, the requirements and design for user-facing management screens and ID consolidation were expected to cost a great deal to build. By adopting Tactna and Auth0, however, the IDs of about 800,000 users were consolidated in about 5 months. The project produced the following main results.
- Cost efficiencyAbout one third of the initial cost of the scratch-development estimate (2/3 lower)
- Remarkable speedA large-scale consolidation that usually takes about a year, completed in about half the time (50% faster)
- Keeping it convenient for usersUsing reference implementations from earlier Tactna projects, users can sign in with their existing student number as well as their email address.
04Outlook and comment from the customer
CPA aims to make this platform the core of its “infrastructure for accounting and finance professionals” and to offer them even more valuable services. Tactna, too, will keep delivering features that answer use cases like this one.
From the customer
As a platform with about 800,000 registered users, further improving the user experience and strengthening our security foundation were among our top priorities. We first considered building from scratch, but by choosing the combination of Tactna and Auth0, we kept the cost to a third and released in just six months, a timeline unthinkable with scratch development. In particular, Tactna's migration module, which merges existing users safely, was critical in removing technical uncertainty. Now that a solid foundation of shared IDs is in place, we can focus our resources on delivering next-generation services, such as AI agents and richer, data-driven user experiences. TC3 is a trusted partner that maximizes our business speed on the technology side.
Comment from Okta
We are delighted that Auth0 could contribute to realizing CPA Excellent Partners' vision. That a complex migration of 800,000 users was completed in a short time, thanks to TC3's advanced implementation capabilities with Tactna, will be an excellent model for Japanese companies looking to modernize identity management with AI in mind.
05Closing
This was a big step: about 800,000 users can now sign in with one ID to the web services they use every day and to services we want them to use across. Using Tactna and Auth0 made the rollout faster. TC3 will keep working to contribute to identity-related operations as we take part in running this platform.
06About Tactna
Tactna is a customer engagement hub that provides control over the identity domain for companies rolling out multiple services and B2B services. It includes authentication and authorization that comply with global standards and can model the organizations that B2B requires. It also provides the management screens for users and operators that service rollouts need, handles flexible requirements, and is used across many types of business. With Tactna, you can implement secure features with a great user experience quickly while also making operations more efficient.