Descope Launches Family Accounts to Power Guardian, Dependent, and Household Experiences

Dependent profiles, independent guardianship, family-scoped roles and attributes, and multi-family participation let consumer apps model real family relationships without building custom identity middleware

LOS ALTOS, Calif., Sept. 30, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Descope, a customer and agentic identity platform, today announced Family Accounts, the first release in its relational identity framework. Family Accounts gives consumer companies first-class identity primitives for parent-child, guardian-dependent, and multi-family relationships, enabling teams to provide family and household experiences without repurposing multi-tenancy or hand-building delegation logic.

Most identity platforms assume every user is independent, with their own credentials, session, and access rights. That model fits enterprise software, where each employee needs their own access and are usually part of tenants or organizations. Consumer applications work differently, because people routinely act on behalf of someone else. AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving report in Caregiving in the US 2025 that 63 million Americans are family caregivers, a 45% increase over the past decade. Nearly a third of these Americans care for both children and adults at the same time. A parent managing a child's health records, divorced co-parents both needing access to a teenager's banking profile, a grandparent joining a household streaming plan—each of these is a relationship without a straightforward way for the identity layer to represent it.

Teams building for these users today fall back on one of two workarounds:

• Sharing credentials across the whole family, which is impossible to attribute and leads to risk exposure in regulated settings.
• Custom-building a household layer on top of their existing authentication system, which costs weeks of engineering effort, produces fragile delegation logic, and often logs actions under the dependent's account rather than the guardian who performed them.

The consequences are already visible in production systems. Research summarized in JAMA Network Open found that fewer than 3% of caregivers have a designated proxy account, while more than a third use their care recipient's patient portal anyway.

"Families are one of the most common access patterns in consumer software, but identity platforms have not done a good job in modeling them," said Dan Sarel, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Descope. "Teams end up bending multi-tenancy into a household or writing their own delegation layer, leading to overburdened engineering teams, security risks, and inconsistent user experiences. Family Accounts puts these relationships in the identity layer itself, so every guardian and dependent user keeps their own identity and every action traces back to the person who took it."

What Family Accounts includes

1. Dependent profiles. Identity records for children, elderly parents, pets, and others who cannot or should not authenticate on their own. A dependent is identified by name and family ID and is reached through a guardian's session. Dependent profiles hold custom attributes and entitlements, link to guardian accounts, and fall under the family's access policies, all without credentials or a login flow.
2. Independent guardianship. Multiple unrelated adults can serve as co-guardians for the same dependent profile, each with their own identity and equal permissions. If one guardian removes their access, the other is unaffected, and neither shares a password with the other.
3. Family-scoped roles and attributes. Users carry different roles and attribute values in each family they belong to, so the same person can be a father in one family and a stepfather in another without custom logic. Families hold their own attributes as well, such as address or plan tier.
4. Multi-family participation. A user can belong to several households with distinct roles and attributes in each, which covers blended families, shared custody, and extended household plans.
   
   

Family Accounts builds on the Descope customer and agentic identity platform, which thousands of organizations including GoodRx, Linktree, Collectors, and GoFundMe use to seamlessly onboard consumers, prevent account takeover, and adapt identity journeys without rewriting application code.

Learn more about Family Accounts in this blog.

About Descope

Descope is a no / low code customer and agentic identity platform that helps organizations easily create and modify authentication and authorization journeys for customers, partners, AI agents, and MCP servers. Thousands of organizations use Descope to improve customer experience, prevent account takeover, and securely adopt agentic AI and MCP with built-in identity controls.

Media Contact

Christine Penwell
Offleash for Descope
descope@offleashpr.com