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Hi everyone,
I’m experiencing an issue with Customer Insights – Journeys (Real-time) when using a field protected by Column Security Profiles.
Hey Silvia, we faced the exact same issue in one of our projects — journey silently routing everyone to the Other branch, no errors, field was populated and readable by users. Took a while to figure out.
Root cause: Customer Insights – Journeys runs under its own backend service user context, not the logged-in user. So even with Column Security allowing all human users to read the field, the journey engine sees null and falls to the default branch every time.
Fix: Add the Marketing service application users to your Field Security Profile with Read = Allowed. The ones you need for journey execution specifically:
How to find them: Go to Settings → Security → Users — by default it opens the Custom Users view which only shows licensed interactive users. Switch the view to Application Users and search for these accounts there and make sure you selected Platform instead of custom on top filter
Enabling the "Use protected fields" feature switch alone is not enough — service users must be explicitly added to the FLS profile first, otherwise the field evaluates as null internally regardless of the switch.
Microsoft docs on this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-insights/journeys/overriding-fls-attributes
Hope that unblocks you! If this helped, please mark it as verified — makes it easier for others hitting the same issue to find the answer quickly. Nagaraju Matta
In Customer Insights – Journeys (Real-time), journey execution doesn't use the interactive user's permissions. Conditions are typically evaluated by the application's backend/service identity.
Even if users have Read access through a Column Security Profile, the journey engine may not be able to read a column secured field unless the service account/application identity also has access.
Since you've already enabled Use protected fields, the next things to verify are:
If the condition always falls into the Other branch despite the value being populated, it strongly suggests the journey runtime cannot read the secured field rather than a problem with the branching logic itself.
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