AGOV in Business
People perform AGOV login processes in different contexts, for example for themselves as private individuals or acting on behalf of a company, an association, and so on. All actions that are not performed as a private individual are grouped under the term «Business».
In 2027, AGOV will introduce the «Business Account» attribute (specification). The person creates a dedicated AGOV account, marks it as a Business Account, and links it to their work email address, which must be registered under the company domain. The domain of the email address cannot be changed afterwards.
The reachability of this email address is not only checked during onboarding, but is recertified annually by AGOV – or more frequently if AGOV target applications require it.
The “Business Account” attribute is passed on by AGOV in the authentication tokens (OIDC/SAML). Relying Parties can react to this and, for example, grant certain access only to Business Accounts or only to non-Business Accounts (Video).
Significance for organizations
With Business Accounts, organizations gain room for maneuver regarding governance, for example options for revoking identities. This allows you to prepare today.
Significance for authorities and public administration
AGOV is therefore also suitable as a login for employees of public authorities. Public authorities can clearly identify such logins as belonging to their own employees, handle them accordingly and integrate them into their own onboarding and offboarding processes.
AGOV can also serve as a trust basis for enrollment and recovery processes for digital workplace sign-in. This enables authorities to develop cross-platform workplace architectures that remain more strongly under their own control, reduce dependencies on individual platform and cloud providers and thereby strengthen their digital sovereignty. Further information: agov.ch/workplace.
Legal significance of Business Accounts and their connection with the business email address
The declaration of an AGOV account as a Business Account and the business email address associated with it do not, in and of themselves, have any legal effect. The acting person remains the natural person. Whether and to what extent their actions can be attributed to an organization or are permissible for it is neither determined nor declared by AGOV. It is up to the target systems of the Relying Parties to evaluate the declaratory properties of a Business Account and to determine their significance in the respective technical and legal context.
Significance for person binding and use by multiple persons
The introduction of the Business Account does not weaken the link between an AGOV account and a natural person: an AGOV account continues to represent exactly one natural person. It is not inconsistent with this principle that a Business Account may be voluntarily declared when the account is used by more than one person (“Shared Use”). This declaration does not change the person binding, but creates additional transparency and enables target applications to respond appropriately to shared use. The represented natural person remains responsible for the account and its use. Further information: FAQ 1.28 «Do AGOV Business Accounts and an optional ‘Shared Use’ declaration weaken the link between an AGOV account and a natural person?» as well as the article «Theoretical foundations of the ‘Shared Use’ declaration option in AGOV.».
Further levels of ambition following the primary introduction of Business Accounts
A next level of ambition is to enable organizations to claim their email domain in AGOV and link it to binding register data. The focus here is in particular on verification via DNS entries as well as connection with the UID register and related registers.