Xavier Auxiliary Services continues to make progress towards digital student IDs

By Clare McKinley, Staff Writer

Xavier’s Auxiliary Services continues to make progress in transitioning physical All Cards to digital ones and aspires to be fully electronic by 2024.  

The All Card, students’ key to every building, dorm room and event will soon be obsolete. Instead, students will be able to access everything they need through an app on their phone. 

The digital One Pass became available last year through the app Transact. By downloading the app, students can sync their Xavier account to their phones or smart watches; instead of inserting a card, they tap their device near a reader.  

Currently, Auxiliary Services is in a transitional period. The main barrier they face to becoming fully electronic is changing the locks on the doors, which is a lengthy and expensive process. 

“Most places are One Pass ready, but we do have a few places where it is still card only, particularly in the dorms with locks. Hopefully soon we’ll be able to replace those, which is fairly expensive and why it hasn’t happened yet. We’re doing it in phases. Until we can do all that, we still have to have the All Card for some of our customers at least,” Senior Director of Auxiliary Services Bill Moran said.  

The next phase of the transition is to replace the locks in Buenger Hall, Justice Hall, Manor House and University Apartments this summer, which would only leave Kuhlman and Husman Halls to be replaced in Summer of 2024. After that, every place on campus will be One Pass ready, and the physical card will likely not be distributed to incoming students.  

According to Aux Services, the purpose of this change is to ensure the security and the convenience of all Xavier students. The One Pass is password protected and ensures that people cannot copy a student’s information. 

The One Pass has been tested to work up to eight hours after a phone has died and also functions with a cracked screen. Moran expects that people are less likely to lose their phone than they are to lose an All Card. 

“We were doing about 1,000 All Card replacements per year… We hope that with the One Pass that number is way smaller,” Moran said. 

“We’ve experienced that people generally would have their phone with them, as opposed to having maybe a wallet or purse that would have the physical ID in it. So we think that we have  attached ourselves to kind of a form factor that they always have, so it’s a convenient way to interact with us and not have to wonder where their card is or go back to the room to get it,” he continued.  

Sarah Beesley, a first-year economics, sustainability and society major, shared a similar feeling when she heard about the possibility of not having to deal with an All Card. 

“I always go everywhere with my phone and use it to tap into most places, so it will be nice that I’ll have one less thing to deal with,” she said.   

For students who still use the All Card for everything, the lack of a physical card will be an adjustment. 

“I’m upset I’ll have to download another app on my phone now. And call me old fashioned, but I like something I can physically hold in my hand,” sophomore psychology major Sean Dwyer said. 

After the transition is complete, Auxiliary Services will be open to offering a vanity ID All Card to go with the One Pass for a small fee, but their goal is to reach a point where there is only one identification per person. 

“Because each identification out there is a liability, by 2024, we want to close that gap,” Moran said.