Colin DePree, North America Sales Strategy Leader at Salto explains how the convergence of physical and digital identity will bring about a new era in security.
I lead strategy and growth for Salto in North America.
As part of the executive team, I work closely with our global leadership in Spain to bring our access solutions to market and support customers across the region.
Like many industries that have experienced significant digital transformation over recent years, we are seeing and responding to consumer driven demand for intelligent access solutions across sectors and vertical markets.
I approach the role with a simple mandate: enable people to seamlessly access modern work, life and play.
That means aligning marketing, business development and our ecosystem of business and technology partners around outcomes people actually feel – unlocking an office without breaking stride, issuing a contractor a temporary credential in seconds, checking into a hotel room with a phone, opening a locker after a workout.
I spend time with distributors, resellers, integrators, installers, property operators and end users, noticing where flows break down and where they excel.
My job is to translate those observations into the roadmap, the partnerships we pursue and the standards we support – so “access” fades into reliable, invisible infrastructure.
The center of gravity is shifting from control to enablement.
If you zoom out, what we call “access” is no longer a single moment at a door, it’s a continuous sequence of small handshakes that carry you through the day.
The common thread is identity. We’re moving from static credentials to identities that travel with you and express themselves in the way that’s most appropriate to the moment: a phone, a badge, a wearable or a face scan.
The experience shifts from “prove who you are at every checkpoint” to “bring your trusted identity with you and let it open the right things, at the right times.”
As that happens, access is expanding well beyond the door.
The same trust layer that manages an office or residence now covers lockers and cabinets, elevators and turnstiles, parking and mobility, event ticketing and cashless payments, and – increasingly – digital services.
In practical terms, one set of permissions can cover a lab door, a pharmacy cabinet and the clinical app that records chain-of-custody.
In a university, a student’s identity ties together the residence hall, the library, the stadium gate and the campus store.
In leisure, a guest can move through a spa, secure a locker and buy an energy drink without switching between systems or credentials.
Another strong trend is a flexible ecosystem. Customers want to assemble the experience that fits their environment rather than accept a closed stack.
That means open, well-documented integrations; identity sync with workforce systems; and management tools that treat access points as software-defined devices.
Updates happen over the air, health and battery status are visible, and analytics can help tune rules so operations stay smooth without becoming intrusive.
The next chapter is about convergence and orchestration.
As identity becomes the common language, the seams between venues and vendors start to disappear.
You’ll see your identity (which you control) carry you from transit to stadium to hotel to a shared workspace in one arc, with clear consent prompts when something new is requested and simple revocation when something should end.
Behind the scenes, access decisions will adapt to context – time of day, location, occupancy patterns, recent activity – granting more or less in ways that are explainable and auditable without being intrusive.
This evolution also changes who is in the room.
Security remains central, but IT, operations, HR, facilities, marketing and guest/user experience all have a voice.
The conversation moves from point access to flow: How quickly can we grant a visitor the right temporary access?
How do we streamline visitor check-in without losing traceability? How do we let a clinician move between buildings and equipment without friction, while keeping sensitive areas protected?
Integrators will increasingly act as orchestrators of identity, data and day-to-day operations, helping customers stitch together best-of-breed components into a coherent whole.
Procurement changes with it. Instead of buying a single “system”, organizations choose an ecosystem – an identity source of truth, access management solutions, user/resident/guest management tools and the connectors that bind them.
The winning choices will be the ones that respect privacy by design, keep data minimization front and center, and offer the flexibility to mix cloud and on-premises where it makes sense.
They’ll also take sustainability seriously: digital credentials that replace plastic, remote diagnostics that prevent unnecessary site visits, hardware designed for long life with simple component swaps rather than full replacements.
Finally, expect user expectations to keep rising. People have grown used to effortless digital experiences; they don’t understand why a building should be any different.
The near future will reward manufacturers and solution providers that make changes fast to meet these demands.
The goal isn’t magic – it’s reliability that feels like magic because it removes friction from a hundred small moments.
When physical and digital recognize the same person in the same moment, security becomes both tighter and easier to live with.
Start with the basics: a single, verified identity reduces credential sprawl. Instead of separate lists for doors, lockers, applications and ticketing, you align permissions once and they flow where they need to.
Revoking access is immediate and comprehensive; there are fewer shadow credentials and fewer orphaned accounts lingering after a role change.
The signal gets better, too. When the tap at a door, the unlock of a locker and the sign-in to an application all trace back to the same identity, it’s far easier to spot anomalies – and to do it without chasing false alarms.
You can see, for example, that an account logged into a system remotely while the same person’s badge was read on site.
Correlating these types of events cuts investigation time dramatically and turns audit prep from a scramble into a routine export.
The most underrated benefit is human. People follow good security when it’s simple. If one identity gets you where you need to go and does so transparently, users stop working around the system.
Front desks don’t need to chase hosts as often. Visitors get exactly what they need for the time they need it. Residents and employees feel like the building “knows” them just enough to be helpful and not more.
That’s the right balance: strong controls expressed as aligned permissions and clean experiences, with privacy built in.
It’s the spirit of zero trust applied quietly to the physical world – never assume, always verify, grant only what’s needed – so that work, life and play can flow together without friction.
Our north star is access to modern work, life and play. You see it in how we approach R&D, how we bring solutions to market, how we partner, how we deliver and how we operate.
We build with openness and collaboration in mind, integrating other access products and platforms, with property and visitor management systems, workforce software, building ops systems, mobility and payments so customers can compose the experience they want and adapt without ripping and replacing.
And we keep the day-to-day practical: straightforward deployment in cloud or on-prem environments as appropriate, well-documented integrations, transparent auditing of actions and events, and enablement for partners and customers so systems are simple to run week after week.
As Salto approaches its 25th anniversary, our focus is unchanged: accessing more together – and making security stronger precisely because it’s simpler.
In our first chapter, we helped reframe what a “lock” could be, from self-contained, battery-powered electronic locks to data-on-card architectures and large-scale wire-free deployments that showed how intelligent software can shape the built world.
That early disruption gives us the credibility, and responsibility, to define the next chapter.
That next chapter is the SALTO WECOSYSTEM; a platform that brings facility access, identity and experience technologies under one roof.
Think of it as connective tissue for a life lived across places, spaces and events: the credential that opens your home and office also gets you through a turnstile, into a locker and into a venue – and that credential is you!
We’ve been deliberate in building that foundation. The acquisition of Gantner extended access beyond the door into lockers, ticketing and cashless experiences – critical in workplaces, leisure, fitness and attractions where identity touches doors, devices and point-of-sale.
Cognitec and TouchByte added face recognition expertise, enabling optional, consent-driven biometrics as another way to express identity.
These moves weren’t about size, they were about surface area; representing all the places your identity should efficiently and safely take you.
We’re also investing in our partner community with expanded programs and resources that make it easier for distributors, resellers, installers and software partners to co-create, sell and support solutions on top of the WECOSYSTEM.
Where does it lead? To a world where identity is the key to everything. A student’s phone becomes a life credential: residence hall, lab cabinet, stadium gate, campus transit, cashless payments.
A clinician’s face scan opens the lab door, a secure cooler and activates specialized equipment according to role.
A traveler moves from metro to hotel to a shared workspace with one consent-rich identity, while security teams see unified signals across physical and digital domains.
That’s the promise of the WECOSYSTEM and why we view it as our blueprint for the future of access and identity.
Real future vision only matters if it’s durable, so we’ll continue to prioritize product development, encryption, privacy, simplicity and sustainability.
All paired with a robust partner ecosystem that keeps the experience human: quick to deploy, simple to use and easy to trust.
The most advanced security is the kind you barely notice, because it lets work, life and play flow as one.
This article was originally published in the September edition of Security Journal Americas. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.