Access & identity
The credential
is the hand.
Print the badge on demand, control access by zone, and — where the site warrants it — replace the badge entirely with a palm. Contactless, unforgeable, and carrying the person's access rights, payment method and loyalty balance in one gesture.
On-demand badge & name tag printing Zone-level area control Palm payments & loyalty
The whole point
A badge proves someone was issued a credential. A palm proves the person standing at the gate is the one it was issued to.
Lanyards get swapped in the car park. That is a nuisance at a conference and a serious problem on a live build with plant moving and inductions that expire. When access is bound to the person rather than to a card, the compliance record you spent six weeks collecting finally has something to enforce against.
The ladder
Pick the credential the site actually needs.
Not every event needs biometrics, and we will tell you when yours does not. These run side by side on the same event — a public day on wallet passes, a restricted plant room on palm.
| Credential | Proves | Good for | Weakness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wallet pass / QR ticket | A valid ticket exists | Public admission at volume | Screenshots travel |
| Printed badge | A credential was issued to a name | Trade floors, staff, exhibitors | Swappable in the car park |
| Badge + zone rules | Issued, and permitted in this area | Back of house, contractor zones | Still swappable |
| Palm vein | This specific person, present and alive | Restricted zones, cashless spend, high-value access | Needs readers installed |
Printing
Badges and name tags, printed as they arrive.
Pre-printing four thousand badges and sorting them alphabetically at six in the morning is a tradition, not a requirement. Print on demand at check-in and the no-shows cost you nothing but the blank stock.
- On-demand at check-in. Scan or look up, print, hand over. Walk-ups buy a ticket and collect a badge in the same movement.
- Typos fixed at the desk. Attendees correct their own name before it prints, instead of joining the reprint queue.
- Role-coloured by badge type. Exhibitor, sponsor, partner, contractor, staff, speaker and VIP print differently, so a security guard can read access from ten metres.
- Name tags for non-ticketed people. Crew, volunteers, VIP guests and last-minute additions get a tag from the same queue without needing a ticket.
- Your artwork. Event branding, sponsor logos, session tracks, dietary markers and accessibility indicators on the badge itself.
- Compliance-gated. Where an induction is required, an unresolved flag stops the badge printing. The desk sees why, not just a failure.
Palm vein
Why the vein, and not the face or the finger.
Palm vein reads the pattern of blood vessels beneath the skin using near-infrared light. That single physical fact is what makes it the right biometric for a crowded, dirty, high-throughput environment.
It is under the skin
A fingerprint is left on every glass someone touches and a face can be photographed from across a room. A vein pattern is internal — there is nothing to lift, and nothing a camera at the far end of the hall can capture.
It requires blood flow
The reading depends on haemoglobin absorbing infrared, so it only works on a living hand. Liveness detection is not a feature bolted on afterwards; it is a property of the measurement.
It survives the real world
Contactless, so there is no hygiene objection and no queue of people wiping a sensor. Unbothered by dirty hands, worn fingerprints, sunglasses, hard hats, beards or a dark loading dock at 5am.
Enrolment takes about twenty seconds
The person holds their hand over the reader, the pattern is captured and converted to an encrypted mathematical template, and the template is linked to their AdmitMe profile. No image of the hand is retained. The template cannot be reversed back into a vein pattern, and it is useless to anything but our readers.
Enrolment happens at accreditation, at a kiosk on arrival, or at the site office on day one — whichever fits how people actually turn up.
- Opt-in, always. Nobody is enrolled without asking. A badge route runs in parallel for anyone who declines, and declining costs them nothing.
- Revocable in one action. Delete the template and the credential ceases to exist. There is no residual copy to chase.
- Scoped to the deployment. A template enrolled for your site works at your site. It is not a portable identity and we do not build one.
- Separate from the sensing layer. CrowdSense stays anonymous by construction and never receives biometric data. Why that separation is deliberate.
Area control
The gate finally knows what the paperwork says.
This is the reason the whole platform sits on one record. A palm reader on a restricted door is not checking a list of permitted names — it is checking the same induction, accreditation and insurance status that your compliance queue has been maintaining for six weeks.
Zones, defined once
Halls, back of house, plant rooms, rigging areas, VIP, contractor compounds. The same spatial model the rest of the platform uses.
Rules by badge type and credential
Contractors need a current induction for the zone. Speakers need green room but not the loading dock. Rules are set per zone, not per person.
Checked at the moment of entry
Not at issue time. A licence that expired at midnight is refused at 6am, even though the badge in their pocket was valid yesterday.
Refusals explain themselves
The reader tells the person what is wrong and tells the site office who to call. A silent red light just creates an argument at the door.
Muster and evacuation
Entries and exits per zone give a named roll call. Combined with CrowdSense occupancy, an unaccounted count becomes a list of names.
Payments & loyalty
The same hand buys the beer.
Once a palm is linked to a profile, it can carry more than access. Cashless spend and loyalty run on the credential people cannot leave in the tent.
Simple payments
Link a card to the profile at registration or at a kiosk. Pay at bars, food stalls and merchandise with a palm — no phone, no wallet, no queue while someone finds their card. Settlement runs on the same Stripe rails as your ticketing, into your own account.
Loyalty that recognises people
Points, tiers, member pricing and returning-attendee benefits accrue against the profile automatically. No card to produce, no app to open, no code to read out — the same gesture that gets them in recognises them at the bar.
One linked profile
Ticket, induction record, access rights, spend and loyalty balance all hang off the same person. Attendees see and manage their own profile; you see the operational view, with spending data governed by the same consent scope as everything else.
Deployment
Readers need installing. That is who Artefact Group are.
Palm vein access is an Enterprise capability, scoped and installed by Artefact Group — the engineering practice behind AdmitMe and CrowdSense. Reader placement, power, network, enrolment stations and the gate hardware are surveyed against your site plan, and the same team configures the access rules on the AdmitMe side.
That matters because a badge printer and a palm reader that disagree about which zone someone is cleared for is worse than having neither. One delivery team, one site plan, one set of rules.
Tell us the site, the zones you need controlled, expected throughput at peak, and whether payments and loyalty are in scope.
- Badge and name tag printing is available without any of this — see pricing.
- Zone rules and area control work on printed badges too. Palm raises the assurance; it is not a prerequisite.
Bind access to the person.
Start with badges and zone rules on your next event, and add palm where the risk actually justifies it.