Mobile credentials have made visitor access faster and more convenient than printed badges or plastic cards. But for sites that host a steady stream of short-term guests, the way those mobile credentials are licensed can quietly become one of the biggest costs of running a visitor program.
Providing temporary visitor access with single-use wallet-based mobile credentials requires paying a license fee for every individual visitor.
In practice, every new visitor needs a new mobile wallet-based credential. When the visit ends, that credential is automatically decommissioned and can’t be reissued to anyone else. Granting access to the next visitor means another transaction.
One single-use wallet-based mobile credential, equals one license, that can only be used for one visitor.
This mobile credentialing process for temporary visitors leads to scaling mobile credential license costs. For an organization that has a high turnover of temporary guests or visitors, contractors, and shift-based workers, such as member based facilities like coworking spaces and health and wellness facilities, issuing single-use mobile credentials can turn a convenience feature into a recurring drain on budget.
Digital visitor passes built with reusable access capacity like readerless mobile credentials for access control provide a more economical approach to temporary mobile credentialing for short term visitors.
Issue readerless NFC mobile credentials for temporary access to users. When one visitor’s access period ends, the same credential can be reassigned to the next person who needs short-term access, with no new license required.
Reassignment instead of additional license costs
Readerless NFC mobile credentials can be reassigned to a different visitor without the creation of an additional credential that creates a new credential license cost.
Customers pay for peak demand rather than every visitor.
For example, if an organization serves 25,000 temporary identities in a year but only needs 100 active at peak demand, that immediately creates the question: why should the credential economics necessarily scale to 25,000?
If peak capacity of visitors never reaches higher than 100 at one time then only 100 re-assignable mobile credential licenses are required.
Rather than issuing a brand-new mobile credential every time a visitor’s credential expires and a new visitor attends, the new visitor’s identity and details can simply be provisioned on to a previously licensed and allocated mobile credential, to maintain the same overall total number of mobile credential licenses assigned.
When a credential is active and currently in use, it can’t be reassigned to another identity. As soon as it becomes inactive, it becomes reusable again and can be sent to another visitor. The next visitor who needs temporary access is assigned an inactive credential rather than provisioning a new credential therefore it never increases the total number of credentials already licensed. This saves front desk capacity and provides additional resources for other customer facing front desk services.
Know roughly how many visitors you get a year and what your peak capacity is? Find out how much you could save.
Your site
Prices are illustrative. Enter your own figures for an accurate comparison.
You serve 25,000 identities a year. Why pay for 25,000 credentials?
At peak, only 100 need to be active at once.
New single-use mobile credential per visitor
Reassignable readerless mobile credentials
Peak demand is higher than annual identities. Check your figures.
Reassignment doesn’t touch the access control system
Reassignment only affects the credential layer and the identity connected to a specific credential. The credential layer and the physical access control system (PACS) access-decision layer are separate, the PACS continues to make the same door-level decisions it always has, it’s simply presented with a validly signed credential for whoever currently holds the active credential.
What about the reader hardware?
Readerless mobile credentials use the user’s mobile phone as a virtual reader and credential and pair it with a wireless and passive NFC Sentry Smart Access Tile that is attached next to a door to enable NFC door access. This means existing reader infrastructure can remain where it still provides value. This also speeds up deployment and removes reader hardware costs meaning the ROI from deploying re-assignable mobile credentials for temporary access grows even higher.
What does reusable temporary mobile credentials for access control solve?
There’s no additional mobile credential license fee per new visitor. When every visitor requires a new NFC mobile credential, cost scales with visitor volume. Reassignable NFC mobile credentials cost is based on the number of overall reassignable digital visitor passes a site needs based on daily usage amount required, not the total number of people who are provisioned a new credential for every visit.
Unlock economical mobile credentialing for temporary access
Reassignable mobile credentials don’t even require an app to be downloaded, they can be simply issued via the desktop or mobile platform straight to a visitor’s email where they can use a URL to unlock their digital pass. Instead of creating, configuring, and revoking a new single-use wallet-based mobile credential for every visitor, an existing mobile credential is repointed to a new identity once it goes inactive, removing per-visitor licensing costs. Security is preserved because reassignment can only happen in the gap between visits: a live credential is locked to its current holder, so no two people can ever share an active mobile credential. The practical effect is that mobile credential licenses for guest and visitor passes scales to the number of access needs happening at the same time, rather than total visitor volume, a number that’s always smaller. This is especially valuable for sites with frequent short-term visitors and guests attending a building that require a day pass, for meetings or companies that have high numbers of temporary staff, contractors, or shift-based workers.
Don’t start with how many visitors you have. Start with how much access capacity you actually need.
Get in touch with Sentry Interactive today and digitize temporary access operations on your site.