Written by I was delighted to have the opening speech at the Transport Card Forum (TCF) in London in which I talked about Mobile Wallets. At the previous meeting there was a presentation about mobile ticketing and a member of the audience asked why there was no mention of the use of mobile wallets. I tended to agree since most of our mobile ticketing projects have been about clever ways of using mobile wallets to get around the technical barriers associated with barcodes, HCE and the like.
There is a problem which Transport Scotland have termed the “Glasgow Conundrum”. Within one city or region, a passenger door-to-door journey might consist of several legs and each of these legs might be services by a different transport operator. Each operator might use a different ticketing technology and accept payments in different limited ways. From a customer point of view, it stinks; integration is what they need. But it is clear that there are two distinct questions:
- 1. How can the customer pay for travel rights?
- 2. How can the customer prove they own travel rights when travelling?
Payments
Ideally the payment mechanism would be decoupled from the type of travel rights and the transport operator. MaaS Providers should be free to accept payments from whatever means suit the customers. If you are interested in this aspect of things, download our white paper: MaaS Payments, a billion dollar opportunity. The download includes a discount code for Transport Ticketing Global 2020 where I will be chairing a panel again in January and judging the awards entrants.
Travel rights
The multiple legs that make up the end-to-end journey might be thought of as what the rail industry called ‘split ticketing’. Rather than having a single ticket, you can buy single tickets for each part of the journey and sometime (usually where Train Operator boundaries are crossed) this can work out cheaper. Mobile apps are very good at hiding this sort of complexity from the passenger and one can imagine that, using geolocation services, the app can decide which ticket should be presented when in order to sail through the gates and turnstiles. And all the split tickets could be stored in the mobile wallets.
Meanwhile, the sales of tickets are diminishing as the areas offering Pay As You Go (PAYG) continue to expand. Project ‘Oval’ round London is seeing the imminent expansion of PAYG contactless bank cards as far as Reading on the new Elizabeth Line from January 2020. For various reasons, Oyster will not be able to be used as far out. So, once again we are seeing contactless bank card technology reaching further than Oyster. There are government plans (election permitting) to add hundreds more rail stations to the TfL PAYG scheme.
London is not the only game in town, and we see other PAYG schemes around the UK. The continued expansion of PAYG represents improved customer experience but is not great news for retailers of travel rights unless they can find a way to sell PAYG and make a profit.
If the PAYG area accepts contactless bank cards (like London), then mobile wallets can be used to allow passengers to travel seamlessly in these areas. Citymapper launched a plastic prepaid Mastercard for this purpose for residents of London only in April 2019. It has recently become available as a virtual card using mobile wallets on both Android and Apple iOS devices. By contrast, the UK smart ticketing standards, ITSO, has partnered with Google and Google Pay wallet has been customised for ITSO so that now ITSO tickets can be loaded into the mobile wallets of Android phones only.
So, lots of choices. And the Glasgow Conundrum continues to some extent, though I can see MaaS Providers apps being able to hide this complexity if they get it right. I was very happy to recently have Ben Whitaker round at Chyp towers explaining Masabi’s take on automatic fare collection using mobile apps. We made a podcast about their Fare Payments as a Service and Ben’s views on where MaaS is going which I found very interesting.
At Consult Hyperion we have a lot of experience with smart ticketing, mobile ticketing and, in particular, mobile digital wallets. If you would like to learn more, give us a call.
