TfL goes global while Semble closes shop
There has been quite a lot of excitement in the last two weeks. A bona-fida Republican presidential nomination in the shape of Donald Trump (face palm), a new British government headed up by Theresa May, mass murder in France and, to top it all off, a failed military coup in Turkey. All this happened since my last editorial! It seems as though things are happening without rhyme or reason on a global scale.
Thankfully, things are a little more predictable and stable within our industry. In 2015, at the Contactless Intelligence Conference, Transport for London’s Matthew Hudson announced that they were looking to export the technology and learnings of running a contactless ticketing solution in London to markets outside of the UK. This has come to pass…
Last week TfL announced that its contactless ticketing system is set to be used by other major cities across the globe as part of a deal worth up to £15m. TfL signed the deal with Cubic Transportation Systems (CTS), allowing them to adapt the capital’s contactless ticketing system worldwide. It is the first of a number of planned agreements to sell TfL’s expertise both at home and abroad – a key manifesto commitment for the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. The licence will grant CTS access to London’s contactless system, allowing it to be specifically tailored for other world cities’ transport systems.
TfL and CTS have a long-running partnership, having introduced the Oyster card system in 2003 as well as working together with the UK card industry to make TfL the first public transport provider in the world to accept contactless payment cards. The contactless payment system was first launched on London’s buses in December 2012 and expanded to cover Tube and rail services in London in September 2014.
Since then, more than 500 million journeys have been made by more than 12 million unique credit and debit cards from 90 different countries, as well as using contactless-enabled mobile devices. Around 1 in 10 contactless transactions in the UK are made on TfL’s network, making it one of the largest contactless merchants worldwide.
“Access to TfL’s technology gives us a major competitive advantage as the transit sector continues to move in the direction of open and mobile payments and account-based systems,” said Matt Cole, president of Cubic Transportation Systems. “Now we can blend the best elements of technology that has been proven at scale in the world’s two largest open and account-based payment transit systems—London and Chicago—both delivered by Cubic, and bring the best-of-breed to all of our customers as a single, global, product suite.”
The present system is also open to all kinds of innovations: Central Saint Martins fashion student, Lucie Davis, has painted a set of acrylic nails in the familiar Oyster colours and embedded a RFID chip to one. The chip, linked to an Oyster account, means that, rather than fumble for their card or phone, the wearer can breeze through the gates at the tube and literally ‘touch and go’.
However, not all travel innovations aimed at contactless ticketing are doing so well. Semble, the SIM-based NFC mobile wallet launched in New Zealand by two banks, three carriers and payments network Paymark, is to be discontinued, the mobile wallet company has confirmed. Semble says it now aims to “refocus the business to develop and build new services”.
The company is jointly owned by Paymark, 2degrees, Vodafone and Spark and signed up New Zealand banks ASB and BNZ for its launch in March 2015. Those using the service to make public transport payments through Snapper will be able to continue using Semble, but without the mobile payment function.
“Semble and its key stakeholders 2degrees, Spark, Vodafone, ASB and BNZ have jointly undertaken a review of Semble mobile payment services, following which they have mutually agreed to discontinue Semble’s mobile payment services, which will also affect Snapper services,” the company said.
“Even though we are discontinuing the current payments service now, Semble remains committed to creating other new services and is planning to extend capability to include for a more flexible, modular and future proofed technology platform which offers even more capability than today, enabling companies to digitise a wide range of wallet services for mobile devices,” the company added.
That’s a shame as, at the time, it appeared that the mobile wallet company was doing everything right by bringing all stakeholders together - including banks and transportation companies. Pity that it didn’t work out in the long run.
Another pity is the demise of Droplet – a mobile payment app which was piloted in the Norwich Lanes and had 40,000 users nationally, including 7,000 in Norwich. Steffan Aquarone who founded Droplet in 2011, said the company had been dependent on new investment for growth, but had suffered in the aftermath of the EU referendum. He stated that the business had not failed and he remained “optimistic” he could raise money from the sale of its technology to return money to shareholders – who took stakes through two crowdfunding rounds which raised £1m.
“We had to make the choice: do we do what a normal start-up would do and hang on until we run out of money? Or do we do the responsible thing and make sure staff are paid and we can return funds?” said Aquarone. “We remain optimistic that by doing the decent thing and remaining masters of our own destiny we will increase the probability of our sale,” he said, adding he hoped there would be an investor “with the clout to make it a success”. In the wake of the Brexit vote, investors had pulled out while currency volatility had delayed the way Droplet received payments, he said. “Medium to long-term prospects have been worsening steadily since the referendum, in particular for fundraising,” he added.
I am genuinely sorry to see this fail as I have spoken to Steffan Aquarone and had the pleasure in hearing him speak at a couple of events and never questioned his commitment and enthusiasm. However, I do question the fault being laid at the door of Brexit – surely a crowded and highly competitive market for this kind of offering is more to blame?
I am sure that this will not be the last we hear of a withering away of European investment and currency volatility as reasons for project closure. It will be an interest second half of the year.
Provided the world settles down a little, that is…
Steve Atkins
Contactless Intelligence
