For years, physical badges have been the standard for event access. They are familiar, reliable, and widely adopted, but they also introduce operational challenges that become more evident as events scale.

Badge printing creates queues during check-in, requires onsite staff and equipment, increases costs, and inevitably leads to issues such as lost or forgotten badges. Every replacement means additional operational work and more friction for attendees.

At BW Events Tech, we saw an opportunity to rethink this experience.

Instead of asking attendees to collect and carry a physical badge, we wanted to transform their phone into their event credential through Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, while keeping the same reliability required for large-scale events.

Because this had never been built within ShowUp, we started with an internal discovery involving Product and Engineering. Together, we explored how Apple Wallet and Google Wallet work, their technical limitations, available APIs, supported pass types, update capabilities, QR code behavior, offline access, branding constraints, and how they could integrate with our event infrastructure.

The goal wasn’t simply to create a digital version of a badge. We wanted to understand whether Wallet Passes could become the attendee’s primary credential throughout the event experience.

This discovery ultimately validated the concept and became the foundation for the product.

Once we confirmed the technical feasibility, I designed BW’s first Digital Wallet Pass experience.

The solution included native support for both major mobile ecosystems, allowing attendees to add their event credential directly to either Apple Wallet or Google Wallet with a single tap.

Beyond the attendee experience, we also designed the operational side of the product.

Inside ShowUp, event organizers received a dedicated interface to customize the Wallet Pass, including branding assets, colors, event information, and visual elements, allowing each event to maintain its own identity without requiring engineering involvement.

Rather than creating a one-off solution for a single client, we designed a reusable product that could be configured by any organizer using the platform.

The first implementation came during LinkedIn’s activation at Cannes Lions 2026.

The event consisted of more than ten independent experiences, each managed through Splash. Traditionally, every registration generated a separate confirmation email and a separate event credential, forcing attendees to search through their inbox whenever they wanted to access another activation.

With the new Wallet Pass, registrations across multiple experiences were consolidated into a single attendee credential.

Instead of carrying multiple passes—or relying on printed badges—participants could simply open their phone and scan the same QR code throughout the event.

During the event itself, we also identified an operational opportunity and quickly released an additional feature inside ShowUp, allowing administrators to preview each attendee’s Wallet Pass and generate its QR code whenever support was needed.