Cities around the world are investigating the new ticketing technologies that enhance passenger experience and drive operational efficiencies in Capex and Opex.
With many case studies of successful ticketing technology implementations being presented at the conference the importance of improving the passenger experience was absolutely clear. Fascinating reviews of contactless ticketing in Washington DC, Dubai and Istanbul clearly illustrated the value that passengers and passenger infrastructure stakeholders can enjoy.
EMV was widely discussed as a catalyst for contactless ticketing. EMV brings many benefits to passenger transport operators particularly in that the passenger brings their own card allowing operators to step out of ticketing issuance all together. Lessons learned from the retail industry’s implementation of contactless payments were shared with attendees. Gemalto is very supportive of EMV as an enabler of mobile services and, where the prevailing conditions are right, we see many more cities adopting it in the near future.
Account-based approach to transport ticketing is also gaining much traction because it shifts the validation of the passenger from a static reader to back-end infrastructure, potentially in the cloud. Whilst this has many attractive benefits for operators there are still questions around acceptable transaction processing times, connections to the back-end and overall network security; three of the important points that determine the viability of account-based transactions. However, the benefits of it are great and many parties are investigating the challenges so it may well be a method for the future.
The conference also raised the issue of investment in ticketing infrastructure. New ticketing technologies require substantial capital investment and in most cash-strapped cities funds are currently severely restricted. Clearly transport authorities and operators need to find new and novel ways to finance infrastructure investments and there was talk at the conference about leveraging end user devices (BYOD) and third party assets such as ATM machines, to deploy new services.
Hence the concept of Trusted Services platforms was introduced by Gemalto in TT15. The key issue for most cities is the implementation of disparate elements of contactless transport ticketing infrastructure and the negotiation with third parties into a coherent whole. Utilising what’s called a Trusted Services Hub allows deployments to take advantage of existing relationships and interoperability – the value of such platforms was discussed in some depth at the conference.
The Gemalto Trusted Service Hub (TSH) is an application agnostic service that allows transport operators to deploy services quickly, efficiently and securely to as many users as possible. It is part of Gemalto’s full range of solutions and services that simplify and secure any transport ticketing transaction: e-ticketing, access control, data storage and authentication.
To learn more about how you can accurately address the challenges of market fragmentation and effectively reach a maximum number of users through large-scale, secure mobile services deployment, download the Gemalto Allynis TSH brochure here.
