Notifications
Clear all
Topic starter
10/07/2026 9:16 pm
TL;DR: Mobile credentials are being positioned as a governance and user-experience lever for large physical access programmes, with the source highlighting examples such as $90M in annual savings and large-scale bank deployments. The real issue is not the credential form factor alone, but whether identity, access lifecycle, and cardholder governance are coherent enough to support it.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by AlertEnterprise: Mobile Credentials That Delivered $90M in Annual Savings and related case studies on physical identity access management
By the numbers:
- Mobile credentials that delivered $90M in annual savings show how access modernisation can produce measurable business impact at scale.
- A leading energy provider has served 15 million people across 50,000 square miles for more than 130 years, underscoring the scale of physical access governance.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should organisations govern mobile credentials in physical access programmes?
A: Govern mobile credentials through the same lifecycle controls used for other access types.
Q: Why do mobile credentials create governance challenges at scale?
A: They create governance challenges when access records, approval workflows, and revocation processes are fragmented across sites or systems.
Q: What do security teams get wrong about physical access modernisation?
A: Teams often focus on convenience and user experience before confirming that entitlement governance is reliable.
Practitioner guidance
- Map physical access to the identity source of truth Ensure cardholder and mobile credential records are linked to authoritative HR, contractor, or visitor data so joiner, mover, and leaver events update access automatically.
- Unify revocation across mobile and badge credentials Design a single offboarding workflow that removes all physical access entitlements at the same time, including mobile credentials, legacy badges, temporary passes, and location-specific permissions.
- Review physical access with the same cadence as IAM Include buildings, cardholder groups, and high-risk locations in periodic access reviews so entitlement drift is visible before it becomes operational debt.
What's in the full article
AlertEnterprise's full case study covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Implementation context behind the mobile credential deployment and why the organisation changed its access model.
- The specific governance and user-experience outcomes attributed to the programme, including the reported savings figure.
- Example deployment patterns for large, distributed estates that need to support thousands of cardholders and access requests.
- How the case study frames physical identity and security convergence for enterprise teams.
👉 Read AlertEnterprise's case study on mobile credentials and PIAM governance →
Mobile credentials in PIAM: what changes for governance teams?
Explore further
10/07/2026 9:38 pm
Mobile credentials are only as secure as the identity lifecycle behind them. The source positions mobile access as a governance improvement, but the underlying control question is whether issuance, revocation, and access review are actually tied to a reliable identity source of truth. Without that, mobile credentials simply move the same governance weaknesses from a badge to a phone. Practitioners should evaluate the lifecycle model before they evaluate the user experience.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 1.5 out of 10 organisations are highly confident in their ability to secure NHIs, compared to nearly 1 in 4 for securing human identities, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
- A separate finding shows that 85% of organisations lack full visibility into third-party vendors connected via OAuth apps, with 38% reporting no or low visibility and 47% only partial visibility.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How can teams tell whether their physical access controls are actually working?
A: Look for revocation completion, access review closure, orphaned credential rates, and exception volume. If those metrics are not improving, the programme may be modernising the front end while leaving governance unchanged. Effective physical access control should reduce manual follow-up and make accountability easier to prove.
👉 Read our full editorial: Mobile credentials and PIAM governance in high-scale access control
