In a recent interview with CampusIDNews, David McQuillin, Atrium Campus co-founder, discussed his company’s cloud-native campus card platform that supports mobile credentials, meal plans, and one card services.

He highlighted what he views as the industry’s shift, as many schools face end-of-life for their current systems. It is a perfect time, he suggests, to focus on enhancing the student experience through mobile technology and autonomous services that drive satisfaction and revenue.

Clients are looking to elevate the student experience both through mobile credentials and autonomous, 24x7 dining and retail tech.

Atrium has grown significantly, adding more than 170 new clients in the past two years.

They have also continually expanded their partner network.

Partners are key to what McQuillin calls Atrium’s “one size fits one” philosophy, offering clients flexibility to integrate with existing systems for access control, POS, laundry, and parking, avoiding costly rip-and-replace scenarios.

Atrium introduced enhancements at the conference, including New Connect, an upgraded mobile platform and Atrium Admin for streamlined management.

Enhancements enable clients to select their preferred payment processors like NelNet or TouchNet. A new AI-powered photo upload tool, developed with CloudCard, further enhances user and administrative experiences.

Mobile credentials remain a key focus, as Atrium now supports HID Mobile, WaveLynx, and Allegion Schlage, ensuring clients aren’t locked into proprietary solutions.

To listen to the full interview, click the image at the top of this page.

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I'm David McQuillin, co-founder and VP of Sales and Marketing for Atrium Campus.

Atrium is an a la carte cloud native campus card program that supports mobile credentials, meal plan management, and the full suite of one card offerings.

We are here at the NACU show 2025 here in beautiful Henderson, Nevada. We've had a great show.

Some of the things that we've been talking to clients about include the changes that are happening in the industry. Those include large end-of-life notices for many providers with their campus card systems. Many of them are looking at similar end-of-life with point of sale and access control.

A lot of clients looking to elevate the student experience both through mobile credential and elevating the dining and retail experience to be more autonomous and 24x7, which is a double win for the universities. It leads to happier students and increased revenue.

In fact, we did a presentation with Bill McGee from UGA and Al Padilla from Cal Poly Pomona where we showcased a couple of these different solutions.

Atrium has benefited from significant growth over the past couple of years, onboarding over 170 new clients over the past two years.

We have now just eclipsed 280 partners. The reason partners are so important to us and to our clients is that we believe in a one size fits one model for campus card where each client gets to decide what's best for them.

Many clients have existing systems they don't want to have to rip and replace. Others want the freedom to choose what's best whether it's access control or point of sale or laundry or parking.

So, our partner model allows them to do that.

A lot of clients are talking to us about innovation, and we feel like we're leading the way in that regard.

Some of the new things we announced here at the show include New Connect, which is our mobile experience.

Atrium Connect really is where we got started as a company in 1998 at Harvard and MIT. We invented that technology, it was called StudentLink.

What we've done now is to completely rewrite that technology to improve the student experience, particularly around mobile credentials, to unify the administration of the system into a single back office we call Atrium Admin, and we are adding the ability for clients to use different payment processors.

Many of our clients have committed to a particular payment processor, an NelNet or a TouchNet and we want to offer them the ability to use that in our portal.

We're also as part of that rollout launching a new photo upload which is powered by CloudCard. It offers a superior user and administrative experience with heavy use of AI to auto crop, auto rotate, auto change the background, even auto approve the photo if the client wants to set the threshold limits to a level where they would allow that.

Mobile credentials continue to be very popular in the industry. Our message to clients is to build a roadmap to mobile.

Some schools are going to take multiple years, some may never deploy it, but our message is you have a plan however long it takes so that along the way you're buying the right hardware and not having to rip and replace at the end.

As an open platform we believe clients should have multiple choices when it comes to the mobile credential provider, so we support HID Mobile, WaveLynx Mobile and recently – through a partnership with Allegion – we're onboarding Allegion Schlage as a mobile credential provider.

This gives our clients three different options, all of them are really non-proprietary in the sense that if they go with those providers they're not locked into a single vendor.

As we've discussed there's a lot of change in the air.

Clients are looking at end of life with their campus card system or their point of sale or their access control, they're looking to elevate the student experience.

What we would like is to have a conversation with those clients. Give us a call, give us an opportunity to talk with you. I think you'll find that Atrium could be a very good fit for your campus.