Since 2008 we have been working with Transport for London to allow contactless payment cards (CPCs) to be accepted wherever Oyster cards are accepted. This was first achieved in December 2012 on buses (which are flat fare in London) using a retail payment model. The next step was to introduce a distance-based payment model to allow all the other transport modes to be included which have zoned fares. This was launched in September 2014.
All the convenience of Oyster (such as not having to queue to buy tickets and fares capping so that you do not need to understand the fares structure) but using a card already in your pocket. Whether you are local or just visiting. But this is for London only. And the solution is based on a risk model that knows the maximum charge for a single journey is not very much. The delivery of such a solution relies on the intelligence migrating from the card to the back office. TfL’s back office to allow acceptance of CPCs for transit is complex and took several years to build.
In early 2012 the TfL payment and security models for contactless payment card acceptance in London where pretty much complete and the rest was ‘mere implementation’. TfL asked us to help them consider how it might work if they offered their back office as a service to transport operators outside of London. These might be in the UK, or potentially anywhere in the world (though different payment model are likely to apply outside of the UK). We discussed at length the notion of using your ‘card as a token’, be it a payment card, Oyster, ITSO or, potentially, other secure contactless tokens. Eventually, the ideas were parked to allow TfL to focus on delivery of the system for London in conditions of extreme austerity.
Meanwhile, we were hired by the SEFT (South East Flexible Ticketing) programme to specify the rail validators that could accept ITSO as well as contactless payment cards. At the time, Transport for Greater Manchester was just starting to procure such a back office for their region. We pointed out to SEFT that this CPC back-office-for-tranist stuff is complex and not standardised. It was therefore decided to not include any interfaces to the payment card back office at that time and the SEFT validator specification was ‘mothballed’ for the time being.
Spare a thought for the traveller buying long-distance rail tickets that include travel within the London area. London supports Oyster and CPCs (and a few specific train operator ITSO products, but not many at this point in time). Some train operating companies are implementing 2-D barcode, and some are trying ITSO. But the only technology commonly read across the UK currently and for the foreseeable future is the cardboard ticket with magnetic stripe. Basically, any ticketing innovation is scuppered at the boundary between London and the rest of the UK. This problem is what our friends at Trainline call ‘managing the join’.
Hopes for contactless payment being accepted for transit outside of London were recently dashed with the announcement that Transport for Greater Manchester has sacked their back office supplier. And anyway, it has been speculated that CPCs only work within London because London is a special case and it could not work anywhere else because the operators will not co-operate and/or the fares are too high for the risk model to work.
Enter the cavalry in the form of the UK Cards Association. They are leading a project with the Department for Transport and others (including representing train and bus operators) to develop a contactless transit framework for the UK by the end of 2015. The project to date has identified three contactless transit models:
- Standard retail model for transit: pay as you go model with a known fare, for buses and trams (like TfL bus retail model).
- Contactless for transit model: pay as you go model where the fare is aggregated at the end of the day or journey leg, for multi-mode operators (like TfL distance-based model).
- Card as Authority to Travel (CAATT) model: pre-purchase model.
This last model could be just what we need for ‘card as a token’ or ‘managing the join’ as we have called it. The idea is the customer:
- Purchases their ticket online and associates it with their CPC.
- Can view their purchase on their statement.
- Uses their CPC as their ticket on a train.
Watch this space …