#9 Why Access Control Needs A Pull Strategy

In the world of digital door access, the industry has spent its entire history perfecting the “Proactive Push.” We have focused obsessively on pre-shared identity – the fob, the mobile credential, the PIN code, the fingerprint, the wallet – all issued before a person ever stands at the door. It is a model built on the logic of the hotel front desk: I know you, therefore I grant you permission. Following this logic, there is rightly a lot of discussion around identity of the person needing access.

And while this approach is right for the majority of access use cases, we as an industry miss out on an important group of people also needing access: The “unknown visitor”. At KIWI, we believe it is time to stop accepting this self-defined limitation for access control and break out of the “Push” dogma. The spearhead where this limitation is hitting a wall first is the building operator managing a sprawling multi-family portfolio.

Traditional access control centers on the Visitor. We pro-actively ask: Who are you, and do I have you in my database? While this is intuitive for a hotel front desk and useful for a lot of access control use cases, it does provide natural hurdles: We need to know ahead of time who will need to enter, and therefore who to onboard. We need to establish a secure communications channel to share credentials with that person – or meet in person like in the old key days. We need to select the right set of doors to grant them access for the right duration. We need to support people through the onboarding process. And all of this and more might be required to happen remotely, i.e. with one or both of the parties not on site.

The intercom model flips this script. It centers on the Host. In a multi-family building, the intercom is the only “True Pull” system we have. The visitor doesn’t need to be known by the system; they only need to be able to reach a Host who is authorized to “pull in” the visitor reactively.

By shifting the focus from “Who is the visitor?” to “Who is/are the host(s) responsible for this door?”, we solve the administrative nightmare of the messy guest and facility management (subcontracting) chain in multi-family housing.

The Integration Gap: Theory vs. Reality

Theoretically, the industry’s goal is a seamless “Push” ecosystem where every contractor or visitor is pre-verified. Integrating with APIs would certainly be the superior way to “know” a visitor by cross-referencing identifiers with an ERP or work-order system in real-time; however, in the fragmented landscape of property management, the reality is that such integrations often remain prohibitively complex, and in many cases, the necessary APIs simply do not exist at all. And for tenants’ guests or the lower tier sub-contracter, it is unlikely there will be such a thing as an API in the near future.

Until the day every plumbing company’s dispatch software speaks fluently to every building’s access database and every technician and sub-contractor on the ground is known to both systems, we need a different solution.

From Persistent Privilege to Event-Based Access

One of the biggest pains our customers face when handling thousands of doors and users is permission granting and the subsequent risk of over-provisioning. Even with the most intuitive UIs and smart ABAC / RBAC: If in doubt, guests are often granted 24/7 access for a task that might take 20 minutes and only happens twice a year.

And even the best system fails, when the guest is not known to the system: In that case the guest ends up ringing the intercom, hunting for physical keys, or trying to “somehow convince someone” to grant them access – even with the best access control system installed. This creates friction, frustration, and significant security risks. 

The Hardware Convergence: “Reader” and Intercom Becoming One

The siloed era of a “Reader” for known users and an “Intercom” for unknown guests is an evolutionary dead-end. Instead, imagine a technician at 10:00 PM who is not yet known to the system. They approach a single device that recognizes the context of the visit.

• The Caller Experience: A simple, data-rich request. No codes, no registration, no app – just a digital handshake.
• The Receiver Experience: The property manager receives a notification with e.g., a video feed and a data overlay. With one swipe, they “pull” the technician through the door, creating a supervised audit trail in real-time.

Pull vs. Push: Navigating the New Access Paradigm

To understand this shift, we must differentiate between three core concepts that are often conflated:

• Unpredicted Visitor vs. Pre-defined User: A “User” is a record in your database; an “Unpredicted Visitor” is a reality of property management. Our systems must stop treating the unknown visitor as an outlier and start treating them as a standard operational event.
• JIT vs. Defined Before Time: “Defined before time” assumes perfect foresight. Just-In-Time (JIT) access acknowledges that the person holding the wrench at 10:00 PM is the only person who needs the door open now, regardless of whether they were on the guest list at 9:00 AM.
• Supervised vs. Unsupervised Entry: “Push” access is often unsupervised—once you have the fob, you are invisible or only visible in hindsight through an access history log. “Pull” access via intercom is inherently supervised. It turns the act of opening a door into a verified management decision.

A Discussion With Lee Odess: Why Access Control and Intercom Are Converging

The topic was recently discussed in a PhySec Collective AMA featuring Lee Odess (CEO, The Access Control Collective), Karsten Nölling (CEO, KIWI.KI GmbH), and Florian Merz (CTO, KIWI.KI GmbH).
One observation from the discussion stood out:

“The bigger takeaway for me is that access control and intercom have always been treated as two industries, and they’re quietly becoming one.”
— Lee Odess

The discussion reinforced a broader shift: as buildings become more complex to operate, access control needs to evolve beyond simply granting predefined permissions. It needs to support real-world situations where access must be granted dynamically, securely and in context.

Watch the full discussion here

Conclusion

The convergence of the Intercom and Access Control isn’t just a hardware upgrade and certainly not a change limited to online doors (more on that in a later blog post). It’s a mindset shift that acknowledges that in the real world, the most important visitors are often the ones we didn’t see coming. By perfecting the “Reactive Pull,” we aren’t just opening doors, we are closing the gap between rigid software and the messy reality of property operations.