Convenience, accessibility and diversity are the key words for transportation fare collection in 2012.  Momentum is building toward transit operators allowing riders to pay with contactless debit and credit cards as well as mobile phones for their transit fares.   The progression of transit ticketing systems into open payment systems is primarily being driven by the introduction and widespread adoption of contactless debit and credit cards as well as new programs designed for processing low-value transactions.

With the expanding integration of near field communication (NFC) technology into mobile devices, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that recent research estimates half a billion people will be using mobile devices as travel tickets by 2015. It is only recently that banks and cell phone providers have begun to open up to NFC for making mobile payments and other uses. 

Welcome to our blog! Starting today, we will add a few new posts each week on a variety of topics, including payment and information systems, fare collection, contactless/mobile payment, and other new trends in the industry.  We want to hear from the people who read our blog, so if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments section of our posts and we will try and respond to every question either in the comments or through a blog post.  If you would like to keep up with our blog, I suggest you follow us on twitter at @CubicTS or like us on Facebook at Facebook.com/CubicTransportationSystems where we will post links to our latest blog posts as well as transportation stats, interesting information, weekly Art of Transit photos and other news from Cubic.  We look forward to hearing your feedback as well as any topics you would like to see covered.

The PATCO Wave & Pay Card open payment program which began on September 26, 2011, has finished Phase One, marking a watershed in the way in which consumers are able to use the same all-contactless transit payment card for both transit payments and retail purchases.   During Phase One of the pilot, PATCO riders could pay for all of their PATCO fares and parking expenses with the PATCO Wave & Pay ANYWHERE Visa® Prepaid Card.  They also could use the same card for retail purchases – for example, to buy a snack at a convenience store or pick up dinner at the super market on the way home from work. 

As summer arrives, Cubic’s leadership in open payment systems for revenue management is blossoming with the introduction of Nextaccount, the first of several new products in Cubic’s solution systems portfolio for the next generation of fully integrated Automated Fare Collection (AFC) systems.  The transit industry is on the verge of a transformation, and Nextaccount creates the ability for transit agencies to continue to reduce their cost of fare collection while improving the traveler and customer experience.