Wallet credentials or plastic badges: what actually changes on site
Phone credentials remove the printer, the lanyard and the Monday-morning replacement queue. They do not remove every reason to keep a card. Here is where each one earns its place.
Every site that moves to phone credentials asks the same two questions: can we throw the cards away, and what happens when someone forgets their phone. The honest answer to the first is usually no, and the second turns out to be easier than the card equivalent.
What changes when the credential lives on a phone
Issuing stops being a physical task. A new starter gets their pass before their first day, wherever they are, and the person doing it never leaves their desk. Nobody prints, nobody laminates, nobody keeps a drawer of blanks. The same is true in reverse: revoking takes one click and the credential is gone from the device, rather than sitting in a jacket pocket until someone remembers to ask for it back.
Loss changes shape too. A lost card is a security event that nobody reports for a day and a half. A lost phone is reported within minutes, because it is the thing people actually notice missing.
Where plastic still wins
Three cases keep the card on site. Visitors and short-term contractors, where installing anything is a bad trade for a two-hour visit - a printed QR pass or a temporary card is faster. Environments where phones are not allowed or not practical: clean rooms, some production floors, secure facilities. And any door where the credential must not be lendable at all, which is really an argument for biometrics rather than for plastic.
The forgotten-phone question
Plan for it the way you plan for a forgotten card: a temporary credential valid for the day, issued from the same screen, that expires on its own. The point of running access control in the cloud is that the exception does not require a visit to a cupboard.
What it costs
Compare the whole line, not the licence. Cards have a unit price, a printer, ribbons, lanyards, the staff time to issue them, and a replacement rate that in most offices sits between five and fifteen per cent a year. Wallet credentials have none of those and one licence. The subscription rarely comes out worse once the replacement rate is in the sum.
A reasonable end state
Most of our sites land in the same place: wallet passes for employees, biometrics on the handful of doors where lending must be impossible, QR passes for visitors, and a small stock of temporary cards for the phone-free exceptions. That mix is not a compromise - it is each credential doing the job it is actually good at.