The University of South Carolina is putting its campus ID on the phone. From Fall 2026 the Mobile CarolinaCard will run on iPhone, Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy handsets and other eligible Android phones and smartwatches, provisioned through the Transact eAccounts app and stored in the device wallet. The university’s Board of Trustees approved the Transact Campus contract unanimously on 17 March 2025, a five year deal with a full term value of $1.5 million.
This is not just a door key. USC describes the CarolinaCard as the permanent USC ID card plus a flexible spending declining balance card, carrying CarolinaCash and Meal Plan dollars, with balances and account history managed through an online portal. Meal plans are supplied by Carolina Food Co. and are mandatory for first year students living on campus. The mobile version therefore has to do identity, physical access and payment at the same time, which is what makes a campus card a harder problem than a plain access badge.
What the first phase covers
The initial phase takes in residence halls, classrooms, dining locations, parking facilities, recreation facilities, postal services and the library, with expansion planned later to off campus locations and to other campuses in the system. That opening list is the high traffic estate rather than the whole university, so coverage on day one is partial by design. Anywhere outside it carries on as before until the rollout reaches it.
Activation is self service. Users download Transact eAccounts, select University of South Carolina, sign in with their network credentials, upload an ID photo and a government issued photo ID, then choose Add to Wallet. The credential can be held on up to two devices. Access is by tap at card readers, with barcode scanning in the app for certain services. The CarolinaCard Office is handling support on 803-777-1708 and [email protected].
“USC wanted to make everyday campus life easier,” said Chavis McDonald, Director of Customer Experience and Change Management for Business Affairs. “Students, faculty and staff already manage so much from their phones, so bringing the CarolinaCard to a mobile format felt like a natural next step.” McDonald also framed the move as forward looking: “Mobile credentials open the door for future innovation. They create a more flexible and secure foundation that can grow with the university.”
What actually changes under the reader
The following is general practice in campus credentialing rather than a description of USC’s specific configuration, which has not been published. A campus card estate of this type runs on 13.56 MHz HF contactless, and a mobile credential in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet reaches the reader over NFC, with the phone emulating a card. The credential itself sits in the phone’s secure element, not in the app. The app is the enrolment and account management front end, not the thing the reader talks to.
The architectural change that matters is not the form factor, it is provisioning. A mobile credential is issued and revoked over the air. A lost plastic card means a trip to the card office, a replacement fee and a window in which the old card is still physically capable of opening a door. A lost phone credential is killed centrally and reissued to a new device in minutes. That is the reason universities keep citing security when they explain these projects, and it is a fair reason.
Apple’s implementation also supports Express Mode, so the card presents at a door or a till without unlocking the phone, and on recent iPhones it keeps working for a period after the battery is too flat to run the phone. That detail is what makes a handset credible as a room key at all. A credential that fails when the battery dies is not a credential.
The two device limit is not an arbitrary policy either. Each provisioned credential is a separate cryptographic instance sitting in a separate secure element, and campus systems are typically licensed or billed per credential. Two is the usual compromise between a phone and a watch.
Tap or barcode tells you how far the hardware refresh got
The most informative line in the announcement is the mix of tap to access and barcode scanning. Where the reader estate has been upgraded you get an NFC tap. Where it has not, the app falls back to a barcode on the screen, read by whatever scanner is already at the counter. Every large campus mobile credential rollout is really a reader replacement programme with an app on top, and the barcode fallback is the honest signal of how far that refresh has actually reached. Expect the barcode footprint to shrink as more readers are swapped out.
Retiring the plastic is the interesting decision
USC is explicit that once the mobile credential is activated, the physical CarolinaCard is deactivated and can no longer be used. Plenty of universities run both in parallel. Going mobile only per user is cleaner, because two live credentials for one identity is a genuine administrative and audit headache, but it does put the handset on the critical path for getting into your own room.
That raises a practical question the announcement does not settle. Mobile credentials are not mandatory for students, according to earlier reporting in The Daily Gamecock and Carolina News and Reporter, which also noted that incoming spring 2026 students acted as a pilot group. Anyone who does not have a supported phone, or does not want to carry one, presumably stays on plastic. It would be useful to see USC spell out how that group is served, and what happens when a phone is lost, stolen or in for repair.
Worth stating plainly: USC has not published the reader hardware, the credential format or the secure element implementation behind the Mobile CarolinaCard, so nothing above should be read as a claim about the specific technology in use on campus.
Read more at https://sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/carolinacard/index.php
