Brivo’s Steve Van Till on how SHIELD Certification could transform building security

AUSTIN, Texas—As the security industry looks to establish clearer benchmarks for building protection, Brivo Founder and CEO Steve Van Till is helping shape what could become a new standard for smart building security.

The company recently joined the Secure Building Council (SBC), whose SHIELD Certification is billed as the first artificial intelligence-powered building security certification.  

Van Till, who also joined the SBC advisory board, spoke with Security Systems News about the importance of being part of the conversation in improving building  security. 

SSN: How will Brivo's customers  benefit from its SBC membership? 

Steve Van Till: It benefits anyone who owns a building because it gives them a yardstick for determining what they want to do for a given level of security. It's not a mandate by any stretch of the imagination – it is a set of objective capabilities that a building owner could add to their platform to get to this level or the next level of protecting their tenants, their employees, whoever's in that building. 

SSN: You’ve described SBC’s SHIELD Certification Program as similar to LEED, a green certification program for sustainability. How do you see security certification impacting or changing the way building owners invest in physical security for the buildings? 

Van Till: If you look at what LEED has done, it has not only set a standard for energy efficiency and other things inside of a building, it's now also become a thing that people look for because so many people are conscious of energy consumption and environmental impact. So, it’s become a selling point. What we would hope is that the SBC standard would follow the same course where initially people would choose to follow it voluntarily because it benefits them as a building owner. They would be able to look to the SBC shield as something that gave them a sense of comfort around this building's done a certain level of protection and my employees are going to be safer in here than they would be in a non-certified building. 

SSN: You’ve also joined the SBC advisory board. Do you feel this will be a good opportunity for you to help influence industry standards or best practices moving forward? 

Van Till: Yes. I was chairman of the Security Industry Association standards committee for 11 years, so I certainly had the opportunity to influence standards in a very direct way then. So that's an area of expertise I bring here, which is the standards formation process which is very much a cooperative process trying to get lots of people with lots of different interests to all align around some core ideas or on core implementation in the case of technical standards, so then a lot of that I bring that to the table as well.