As the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread, many London employers closed their offices and implemented remote work policies.
Some of those policies continue today. But more employers are looking at ways to get employees back into the office, and office real estate owners are sweetening the deal by creating “best-in-class buildings,” says Mark Caldwell, Asset Manager, AshbyCapital.
The JJ Mack Building in the Farringdon area of London is a testament to that philosophy. The 10-story multitenant building constructed in 2022 has more than 200,000 square feet of office space accompanied by several thousand square feet of patio and retail space—including a wraparound patio on the seventh floor with views of the Museum of London.
The building’s name is a reference to the past, as JJ Mack was a fruit and vegetable trader whose shop was on the site of the new building. But looking to the future of technology and building performance were at the forefront of the project—designed by Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands — to make it both more sustainable and attractive to occupants, Caldwell says.
“We’ve invested a lot of time in improving the technology of a typical building, and that can even be seen through access control with the addition of the Wavelynx Apple Wallet, which is a much more user-friendly, seamless way of accessing the building.
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The System
Traditional access control systems have relied on key cards, badges, and fobs to validate that their carriers are allowed to enter certain areas of a corporate campus. But these credentials can be time-consuming to issue and unsecure, says Danny Venturelli, head of customer success at Smart Spaces, a smart buildings software provider that has worked with AshbyCapital for more than seven years.
When the JJ Mack Building project came onto the horizon, Venturelli says Smart Spaces rolled out a mobile credential system that used Bluetooth to function. The plus was no waste from plastic key cards and a less onerous deployment process, but a big drawback was the user experience. People complained that there was a delay in connecting mobile devices to the readers, the access control application had to remain open on the user’s mobile device, and keeping Bluetooth on continuously was a major drain on mobile device battery life.
So, they went back to the drawing board and discovered Wavelynx’s Wallet Solution. It’s also a mobile-based credentialing system for access control, but it leverages the device’s wallet—Apple Wallet, Google Wallet, or Samsung Wallet—to store credentials. The solution is technology-agnostic, so it works with several brands of access control readers.
The JJ Mack Building already had a designated mobile phone application for tenants to use, so SmartSpaces worked to leverage that app to deploy the Wavelynx solution. When a new user logs into the building application, it triggers an application programming interface (API) call to Wavelynx to issue a mobile wallet credential. Users then download the credential to their mobile wallet, which securely stores the credential on the user’s device. Meanwhile, the application is integrated with the JJ Mack Building’s STid access control system to add that new credential to the building’s system.
“It’s a truly seamless onboarding of a digital credential, and they’ll be able to access the building and the areas that they’re allowed access to immediately,” Venturelli explains.
Alternatively, if a tenant needs to revoke a user’s access to the building, an administrator can use the application to remotely disable that user’s credential—eliminating the need for an in-person interaction or a credential hand-off.
“You’ve got more ways to disable a user’s pass, and you can do that remotely now,” Venturelli says. “You don’t need that person on the security desk at all times.”
The Install
It took a few months to roll out the Wavelynx solution at the JJ Mack Building because of one initial pain point. The building’s original access control readers needed a firmware update to work with the new mobile wallet credential.
“Unfortunately, the firmware update wasn’t as easy as just flashing the reader with a configuration card,” Venturelli says. “It required the reader to be removed, plugged into my laptop, and then I needed to apply the firmware onto that reader. And we had to do that same process for every building in the reader, of which there are about 80. It was pretty time-consuming, but we got there.”
But then they ran into challenges with the elevators’ access control readers, which are special destination panels that grant access to certain parts of the building. Venturelli was unable to update the firmware on those readers—he had to send them back to the manufacturer and get a new reader with the firmware already installed. Fortunately, the manufacturer decided to cover the process at no cost.
Since installation in 2023, Caldwell says that the feedback on the mobile wallet-based solution from tenants has been positive.
“It’s a much more seamless way of accessing the building compared to what was installed previously with the Bluetooth credentials, which are a bit slower, a bit more clunky.
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Tenants also appreciate the mobile wallet solution because it’s similar to the approach many users already take to accessing other spaces in their daily life.
“We want to be replicating that experience that you use on the Underground here in London or in a shop within the building, too, so you can access your space in the same way,” Venturelli says.