Kastle, a provider of managed physical security services, is the first company to roll out Aliro 1.0 credentials across Apple, Google and Samsung mobile wallets. This milestone makes Kastle the first to certify a fully interoperable credential standard across all three platforms, a move aimed at accelerating widespread adoption of mobile access.

Historically, end users had to live the reality of disjointed security systems. Moving across multiple buildings in a common space could require a different credential for each location. “The more secure you try to make it, which is where people are going, the more cumbersome and, ultimately, more expensive it was to have to carry a bunch of different credentials and badges for every access system,” said Haniel Lynn, CEO, Kastle. “We looked at this as the holy grail problem in access control that Kastle, as a company, has been working on, literally, for a decade.”

Delivering Aliro-enabled readers, secure cloud-based credential management and Aliro wallet-based mobile credentials across Apple, Google and Samsung platforms is, for Kastle, the way to end this fragmentation.

Kastle was part of the Aliro leadership group that helped shape what the standard was going to look like. “We recognize that this standard, as it evolved, wasn’t just going to be ‘nice to have’ for the industry, but was really going to be a path that was going to solve the problem,” Lynn said.

Kastle-issued mobile credentials built on Aliro 1.0 work with any reader or manufacturer, eliminating the vendor lock-in issue. “For years, building owners and tenants were trapped in closed ecosystems and locked into fragmented, proprietary systems with no path forward. That’s the legacy problem Kastle set out to solve,” Lynn said. “By championing interoperability and establishing a common standard through Aliro, we’ve finally broken down these silos. For the first time, workers can use their mobile phones seamlessly to access offices and commercial buildings across different platforms and manufacturers.”

Lynn and the Kastle team believe in an interoperable future where the Aliro specification is widespread. “Any technology evolution requires work to get done, no matter how great it is,” Lynn acknowledged. Particularly, Lynn pointed to the companies that are afraid their products will get commoditized by the shift, which will fight to slow Aliro’s adoption.

“Ultimately, I think the end user is going to demand it, which means it will eventually cascade and have that change in the marketplace,” Lynn said. “There certainly will be expense associated with changing to Aliro-certified readers, and there will be natural capital cycles that you’ll have to manage in order to get to the other side of it. All of that means that there are legacy systems that they’re going to have to get sorted out as you eventually evolve to what I think will be the standard, but that takes time.”

By aligning early with the secure, interoperable framework, Kastle’s goal is to accelerate adoption across commercial real estate, multifamily and enterprise environments — bringing simplicity to what has historically been a fragmented experience.

“We didn’t wait for the market to adopt Aliro … because we believe that this idea of supporting our customers against the biggest problem for access control is worth the fight,” Lynn said. “We are strong advocates for deploying the standard and for shaping the standard and are excited that we have, along with us, big tech in Samsung, Google and Apple that are pushing for the same thing that we are. With them and their innovation and their power, it will drive mobile adoption in a way that I think many of us have hoped for for many years. It will also allow us to innovate from there as the next step up for what real experience is like in built spaces.”