Collectors Report | Page 10

Descope Co-founder Rishi Bhargava says flow-based identity lets teams secure human, machine and agentic access with scoped permissions and rapid updates Written by: Lucy Buchholz

Building authentication in-house starts as a straightforward task for many developers, but as growth accelerates, it can become harder to manage the various user journeys, integrations and security demands. Every new access layer can draw engineering teams back into the codebase, turning identity into an operational bottleneck. Descope, a customer and agentic identity platform, aims to solve these issues through flow-based orchestration, allowing organisations to design and modify authentication journeys visually without writing code.

Descope Co-founder, Rishi Bhargava, explains that when enterprise identity setups become fragmented, growth stutters. As a result, Descope has put solving this challenge at the core of its philosophy, as Rishi says:

“ The key was to stop treating each brand and each user type as its own island.”

-Rishi Bhargava

Descope and Collectors – which runs some of the best-known brands in the collectables world, including PSA, PCGS, SGC and Beckett – began working closely together after its identity setup became fragmented, creating overheads for a lean identity group. Collectors had three distinct identity models to support: consumer authentication across its brands, partner authentication through external identity providers, and employee access through corporate SSO. However, its legacy setup“ lacked the federation flexibility, token customisation and machine-to-machine control their rapidly scaling environment required.”

Collectors therefore evaluated Descope on specific criteria:

Providing federation flexibility across portals and brands

Ability to replicate their existing JWT claim patterns and scope controls