ICON South Beach is a luxury condo tower on Miami Beach, in the SoFi neighborhood. We upgraded their more than 1000 residents to a mobile wallet experience with HID.
ICON South Beach had already moved residents off plastic cards and onto HID Mobile Access, using Bluetooth "twist-n-go" credentials. In practice, Bluetooth proved unreliable for a busy residential tower. The credential only worked if the HID app was running correctly in the background, which phones don't always allow, and radio interference around the elevators led to missed and delayed reads. Residents ended up opening apps, retrying, and calling the front desk. Behind the scenes, property management was keying every resident into two systems by hand: Millennium Ultra for access control, and HID Origo for mobile credentials. Every move-in, move-out, and change meant duplicate work and a chance for the two systems to drift apart.
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Industry
Multifamily / Luxury Residential
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Deployment Scope
Building perimeter, lobby, package room, elevators, and amenities
“This is actually amazing. The operations team loves it, the residents love it. It works seamlessly. Highly recommend!”
Frank Rafuls Director of Security for ICON South Beach
Solution
Working with HID, AccessGrid moved ICON South Beach from Bluetooth to NFC credentials in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, read by the HID Signo readers already on site. Wallet credentials don't depend on a background app, so a resident holds a phone or watch to the reader and the door opens.
AccessGrid also built an automation on top of Millennium Ultra so that Millennium is the single system of record. Property management enters a resident once, and the wallet credential follows.
- Reader Compatibility: The existing HID Signo readers at the perimeter, lobby, package room, elevators, and amenity spaces read AccessGrid-issued wallet credentials over NFC, so no door hardware was replaced.
- Wallet-Native Credentials: Residents receive an Apple Wallet or Google Wallet pass instead of installing a separate app. NFC needs a deliberate tap at close range, which removes the background-app and elevator interference problems that came with Bluetooth.
- Millennium Ultra as System of Record: AccessGrid's automation keeps wallet credentials in sync with resident records in Millennium Ultra. Issuing, updating, and revoking access no longer requires a second system or a second round of data entry.
- Deployment & Rollout: Passes were issued to every resident in the building, and residents started using them as their daily credential straight away.
100%
of residents issued wallet passes in week one
1,000+
residents on Apple Wallet and Google Wallet
60+ hours per year
of duplicate data entry eliminated
One system of record
Millennium Ultra drives every credential
Results
Moving to wallet credentials and a single system of record made access more reliable for residents and easier to run for staff. Key outcomes include:
- Immediate Adoption: 100% of the residents that were issued wallet passes in the first week, installed them and use them every day.
- Reliable Entry: Wallet credentials over NFC removed the Bluetooth failures caused by apps not running in the background and by interference around the elevators.
- Operational Efficiency: With Millennium Ultra as the system of record, duplicate entry into HID Origo is gone, saving property management 60+ hours every year and hundreds of hours over the life of the building.
- No Hardware Changes: The existing HID Signo readers stayed in place across every access point in the building.
ICON South Beach now gives more than 1,000 residents a modern, phone-based access experience, and its security team manages it from the system it already uses.