Costs of B2B Friction – How Broken Partner Access Is Undermining Revenue

The supply chain doesn’t break at logistics anymore. It breaks at login.

According to the Thales Digital Trust Index 2026 report, 89% of partner users have delayed or abandoned work due to access issues. Let that sink in and imagine the impact on your topline.

This elevates the issue from an IT convenience to revenue at risk, forcing organizations to examine how friction in their partner/supplier/reseller onboarding and authentication processes might be undermining bigger, more long-term gains. 

Smooth Partner Onboarding is the Exception, Not the Rule – Unfortunately

The Thales report reveals that among partners, only 22% receive working login details immediately; the rest have to wait.

In addition:

• Only 30% get full permissions the first time
• 66% lose access to external partner systems while they still need it
• 92% experienced access issues overall

The problem (beyond what’s already been laid out) is that in these situations, partners find workarounds. When faced with access friction, nearly two-thirds (66%) have shared or borrowed credentials, with over half citing slow official processes as the cause. 

These issues present even more business risks. Not only does delayed access prevent partners from doing their work or delivering value, but it also leads to the kind of technical fence-jumping that could cause companies to lose value they’ve already gained. 

Beyond the productivity hit, delayed access and credential workarounds accumulate what the report calls ‘silent security debt’, a growing exposure to breaches and compliance risk that rarely gets priced into onboarding cost calculations.

When it takes an average of 30-60 days for third-party assessments alone and 1-6 months to bring them on board, these kinds of delays are as expensive as they are inexcusable. 

Putting a Price Tag on Onboarding Delays

If your partners aren’t logging in cleanly and immediately, they’re not fully onboarded. And if they’re not fully onboarded, you’re not seeing full ROI.

Over a quarter (26%) of companies report losing $500k or more due to partner integration issues. Slow onboarding leads to missed deals, delayed time-to-revenue, and partner churn, incurring additional costs along the way. 

It costs thousands of dollars to onboard a supplier, and companies are looking to make that up with quick time-to-value. Login issues, false starts, and ongoing friction not only delay start times but also throw off long-term timelines, wreck projected productivity, and force teams to redo expectations. The result: work waste and revenue loss.

To highlight just one area of loss, password resets still cost around $70 per incident, and, applied to real user populations, that equates to $37,800 annually for 3,000 registered users. Whether those users are your employees or third-party employees using those credentials to log in to your systems. 

It is worth noting that most IAM administration is still done in-house, but research shows that more partners are willing to take this on. More on this in the next section. 

In the worst cases, too much friction could lead to missed opportunities, and this holds true across the board. A quarter of businesses report losing a deal due to slow legal onboarding processes. According to Fenergo’s 2025 Financial Crime Industry Trends report, 70% of financial institutions globally lost clients due to slow or inefficient onboarding. 

And like the opening stat introduced, “89% of partner users have abandoned or delayed a work task with an external partner in the past 12 months due to a website or app issue.” No matter the industry, or if it’s B2B or B2C, IAM friction in the onboarding process is a cost center, but it’s one that can be avoided.

What Partners Want out of B2B Access?

The Thales research revealed an interesting trend that could help companies offset the cost of B2B access: shifting more of the burden to partners themselves. Perhaps not surprisingly, partners want that. 

According to the report, partners want more self-service access, so access is increasingly in their hands. Over half (54%) wanted the ability to reset authentication factors themselves, and 52% wanted to see their current entitlements.

Delegated User Management, a key component of Extended Enterprise Access, fills this need, allowing organizations to maintain overarching control over identity systems while the responsibility for third-party access is offloaded to the third parties themselves:

The host organization decides which IAM controls can be delegated. A delegated manager within the partner organization takes the lead on that, acting as a proxy admin for their users. That partner has the power to grant, revoke, or update access for their team, and all requests go through them. 

This leads to offset costs for the host while resulting in greater (and faster) ROI. IT gets fewer repetitive tickets; access issues get resolved faster, so teams can get back to work sooner; and third-party IAM issues don’t result in greater costs as the partnership scales. 

Offloading IAM may be step one. But no matter where the onus resides, automation has to be step two. 

Making Automated B2B Access the Norm

When surveyed by Thales, only 22% reported that system access was automated or “provided immediately.” That means four out of five had to wait. And in an era of AI and hyperautomation, many are wondering why. 

The absence of these automated workflows takes a toll in other areas as well: only 19% reported that access changes keep pace with working needs. This can be a problem. A sale could be lost if the distributor can’t retrieve the proper inventory information. Or a competing vendor may be quoted when a reseller can’t access pricing tools.

Partner/B2B IAM is a Financial Issue

All this underscores the fact that B2B IAM extends far beyond convenience and PX. IAM failures delay projects and billing cycles. They propagate outdated information and force host companies to bear supplier costs they shouldn’t.

This makes partner IAM not just an administrative issue, but a financial one with revenue at stake. 

Because people are accessing these systems, friction leads to frustration, errors, time loss, and a domino effect of lost productivity. It sets everything off on the wrong foot, and in the case of many deals, things won’t recover. 

Partnerships don’t have to come with a buffer for operational drain. To ensure they don’t, senior leaders have to take B2B access out of the IT weeds and into the boardroom. 

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About the Author:

Ammar Faheem

Director Product Marketing (CIAM) |  + postsBio