Most people only think of mobile credentials being used for authenticating user access to doors or gates. However a mobile credential that doesn’t depend on wired reader hardware isn’t limited to doors. It can authenticate identity anywhere access needs to be granted, checked, or revoked. One of these use cases beyond the door is EV car charging.
What if EV charging access ran on the same credential as the rest of a site’s identity and access systems? Most mixed-use commercial and residential sites haven’t made that connection, charging still runs as its own fragmented system.
How EV charging works today
Most buildings with EV charging bays, commercial car parks, residential garages, mixed-use developments, run charging access as a separate system from every other form of access on site.
Despite the rise of Plug & Charge and network apps, the RFID card remains the dominant way to start a session largely because it was built to do one job: identify a billing account. It isn’t a general-purpose access credential, and it was never designed to be one.
The charging problem at commercial workplaces
The clearest example is the commercial workplace. An employee already carries a keycard or mobile credential to get into the building, the car park, maybe a secure floor. To charge their car, facilities teams need to issue yet another separate RFID card or fob tied to a charging account, managed outside the building’s access system, with its own provisioning and revocation process.
This is an identity fragmentation problem for workplaces. Every additional credential is another thing to issue, track, and deactivate when someone leaves, and another system that has no idea who the person actually is.
What RFID cards can’t do
RFID cards and charging apps authenticate a billing relationship. They don’t authenticate identity. For a multi-tenant site – residential, mixed-use, or commercial. That distinction matters as soon as an operator wants to control charging access based on who someone actually is: a resident, a tenant, an employee, a visitor.
They can’t answer questions like:
- Is this person still a tenant, or did their lease end last month?
- Is this bay reserved for a specific company or department and does the person work in that department or company?
- Should access change automatically when someone’s role or tenancy changes?
Identity-aware access, name, department, time of access, location, tenancy status, isn’t something a card built to identify a billing account can support.
The same credential, one more endpoint
What if users could use the same credential that unlocks a building entrance, a parking gate, or their office, to plug in their EV vehicle in a charging bay, without a separate keycard or fob, a second app, or a second system for facilities to manage.
This is possible with readerless mobile credentials, mobile credentials that don’t require reader hardware and can work across multiple platforms and systems to unify access.
The user’s mobile phone acts as the reader and the credential that can be paired with a Sentry Smart Access Tile, a wireless, ultra-slim acrylic tile with a passive NFC chip on the back that can be mounted next to any access point.
Mounted at a charging bay, it lets a resident tap their phone against it using NFC technology; the credential stored on the user’s phone sends a signal to the cloud service, which authenticates the users identity and access against that specific bay and that specific booking window, then releases the connector lock only for as long as the session is valid.
Tying charging access into the same identity layer as the rest of the building means facilities teams manage one credential lifecycle instead of two, and access decisions like; who can charge, when, and where, follow the same rules as every other access point on a site.
EV charging doesn’t need its own access ecosystem. It needs to be one more endpoint on the one that already exists.
The security model doesn’t change
Every credential authentication process runs through the same protection a door unlock gets. Readerless mobile credentials use asymmetric cryptography: a public key verifies the credential, while the private key never leaves the secure enclave of the user’s device. Each interaction follows Zero Trust principles with a unique challenge-response exchange each time, so a credential can’t be cloned or replayed, whether it’s opening a door or releasing a charging bay.
In conclusion
Charging bays expose a problem that doors mostly hide: access isn’t just about who’s allowed in, it’s about who’s allowed what, where, and for how long. EV charging doesn’t need its own access ecosystem, it needs to be one more endpoint on the identity layer a building already has, governed by the same credential.
