2017 - In-car payment, IoT & single ticket travel
Welcome back! 2017 has finally rolled around and we wish all our readers a very Happy (if somewhat belated) New Year. Not wanting to diverge from tradition, we start this year’s editorial looking at what (IMHO) will be themes and topics to expect from the industry.
First up - the Internet of Things. CES last week gave us another glimpse of the soon-to-be-upon-us future. This time in the form of connected fridges. Devices that allow us to order products when we run out has been around for a while. You could even argue that the Amazon Dash buttons are just one early form of Internet of Things. However, the Holy Grail must certainly be that humans are taken out of the equation altogether - the appliance should do our work for us! Samsung have always followed this idea with their intelligence refrigerators. However, US consumers will soon be able to use their voice to order groceries directly from their fridge with the latest edition of Samsung’s smart connected fridge platform and an updated version of the Groceries by Mastercard mobile app. Family Hub 2.0 will also expand availability from four refrigerator models to ten.
“Later this year, consumers who have the refrigerator can use voice search to look up items by either brand or product and order from leading online grocer FreshDirect”, Mastercard says. “For example, they can say ‘search for ketchup’. Once options show up on the screen, they can then select the item and add it to the virtual cart all via voice and also select a slot for delivery. Final checkout, however, occurs with a four-digit security code that has to be typed in to authorise the card transaction. Items are then paid for in a simple, single checkout experience that accepts any US issued credit and debit cards.”
Other updates include internal cameras to help consumers determine which items need to be replenished and a new interface that enables family members to create their own profiles, using avatars or personal pictures, and share photos, memos and write calendar invites through their smartphones, which are then displayed on the fridge’s 21.5-inch LED touchscreen. Samsung is also collaborating with additional partners including Grubhub, Nomiku, Glympse, Ring, Spotify and iHeartRadio to provide “further upcoming choices for food delivery and cooking, location-based safety and home security services and entertainment offerings,” the company adds.
But what about that other unofficial place of residence for so many of us - the car? The place we seem to spend most of our waking lives. Well, it would appear that this is about to get a payments make-over for 2017. A variety of news pieces have already broken over the past few weeks that tie payment to automotive. First is the news that Volkswagen Financial Services AG has acquired PayByPhone, the world’s leading provider of cashless payment systems for parking, from PayPoint plc at the end of last year. PayByPhone is based in Vancouver, Canada and also operates in the USA, France, Great Britain, Switzerland and Australia.
“With our acquisition of PayByPhone, we are now the leading provider for the processing and mobile payment of parking procedures. In the future we will be bundling this know-how in a separate business field around the theme of parking,” says Dr. Christian Dahlheim, the Management Board member responsible for sales and marketing at Volkswagen Financial Services AG. “For us, PayByPhone is the ideal addition to our portfolio because the company enables us to consistently expand our international presence in all areas relating to mobile parking management and digital payment solutions. Moreover, PayByPhone is highly innovative with excellent user-friendliness on all mobile devices.”
China has also announced their first Internet Car – the Roewe RX5. The manufacturer is Banma - a new joint venture between Alibaba Group and SAIC Motor Corporation Limited (SAIC Motor). Features include advanced telematics such as Bluetooth virtual car key, locationing of the vehicle, voice-command-enabled remote control of in-car functions, and real-time road condition alerts, etc. The MIM is compliant with the GSMA standards and supports remote provisioning of any operator’s profile. In-vehicle payments are also expected to be incorporated within the system in the near future.
At this years 2017 CES Visa and Honda also demonstrated proof-of-concept of in-vehicle payments with infrastructure parking and fueling partners. Developed by the Honda Developer Studio, the fuel and parking proof-of-concepts offer a quick and seamless in-vehicle payment solution, delivered through smartphone integrations. Honda and Visa first joined forces last year and they are now joined by Gilbarco Veeder-Root and IPS Group, Inc. in collaborating in the effort to transform the way consumers make in-vehicle payments for every day services such as gasoline and public parking.
"Turning the car into a platform for payments offers a nearly endless array of ways for automakers, drivers, merchants and other infrastructure companies to completely transform tasks that are tied to cars in some shape or form," said Avin Arumugam, senior vice president, Internet of things (IoT), Visa Inc. "Working with Honda, we both see the huge opportunity this presents for our respective industries, and how we can collectively simplify many daily tasks from the car."
Finally - not to be forgotten - there is the matter of ticketing. A single integrated and easily accessible ticketing system covering multiple regions and modes of travel is central to the idea of smart travel. 'A single travel account will help enable economic growth, especially in North England, and should be available to the whole of the UK, not just accessed by London’s city-dwellers' - said a number of news reports at the beginning of this month. UK Transport Secretary Chris Grayling will make the initiative a priority for his tenure, rolling it out within the next two years. Speaking at the North of England Transport Summit, he said, “Passengers should not have to carry a Manchester card, a Leeds card and a different one for each city and for longer journeys, bar codes on mobile phones should be available. The whole transport sector should move very rapidly towards this.”
The argument goes that improved transport services will encourage greater inter-modality across cities through a ‘compelling customer proposition’. In turn, this will boost the Northern England economy, improve network optimisation and lead to reduced congestion on the surrounding highways.
It is an idea that is being echoed by Germany’s transport minister Alexander Dobrindt who has promised to expand the availability of mobile ticket payment services across the vast majority of the country’s public transport network by 2019. Currently each city or region operates its own transport payment and ticketing system, with some enabling payment and ticketing through apps and others running cash or card-only provision. Under the new rules, the same mobile payment and ticketing application will work across the country with customers offered the option of using cards with contactless chips, mobile apps or traditional payment methods.
Looking beyond that, Dobrindt said he believes there should be pan-European mobility platforms to improve customer communication and payment for transport services, adding “we must promote digitalisation and networking in this area.” A pan-European ticketing system that could get triggered in 2017 along with a German country wide effort.
We also have a number of authors on our site that have written their forecast for 2017 looking at topics such as digital identity, tokenization and the cashless world. Whichever way you look at it - forecasts for 2017 abound. But who will be proved correct in the long run?
Steve Atkins
Contactless Intelligence
P.S. The Deadline for submissions for the NFC Innovation awards have been extended until the 18th January so there is still time enter by clicking on the banner below.
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