Case Study: City of Richmond achieves a unified, secure citizen portal and single sign-on with Ping Identity

Large Canadian City Reinvents How Citizens Safely and Securely Get Access to Their Services

The City of Richmond, British Columbia, faced a fragmented digital experience: citizens had separate accounts and credentials for utilities, taxes, recycling and other services as municipal agencies had deployed independent portals. Concerned about usability, data silos, disparate identity mechanisms and regulatory/privacy requirements, the city set out to shift from a business‑centric model to a unified, citizen‑centric personalization portal with single sign‑on and least‑privilege access.

Richmond built the MyRichmond portal on the ForgeRock Identity Platform, using standards (OAuth/OAuth2, SAML), RESTful APIs and microservices to unify identity, authentication, authorization, self‑service and directory services across systems. The rollout delivered strong results—user profiles and logins were twice expectations, the system handles hundreds of authentication requests per second and can scale to thousands, implementation effort was minimal, and the city now has a foundation for features like push, password‑less and multi‑factor authentication.

City of Richmond

Grant Fengstad

Director of Information Technology and CIO