Cubic Transportation Systems (CTS), Transport for London (TfL) and Barclaycard have received another major honor for London’s contactless bankcard payment system, after winning the prestigious ‘Operational and Technical Excellence’ award at the 2015 UITP (International Association of Public Transport) closing award ceremony in Milan.
The three-way partnership was up against a strong group of shortlisted entrants from around the world including Spanish Railway Company FCG, the Korea Railroad Research Institute and China’s MTR Corporation.
Launched in 2012, the contactless bankcard payment system was extended in 2014 to cover London’s entire transport network – including Tube, rail, bus and tram services.Cubic played a crucial role in the development of the scheme, spending three years researching and developing the Tri-Reader 3 specifically for the project to process contactless-enabled credit and debit cards as well as mobile devices. It is the first reader in the transport industry certified to read Oyster cards, ITSO cards and NFC-enabled devices.
One in ten contactless bankcard transactions in the UK are made on TfL’s network, making it one of the largest contactless merchants worldwide, with more than 100 million contactless bankcard journeys made on its services since it launched in September 2014. Over four million unique credit or debit cards have been used on TfL services so far, with more than 1.2 million contactless transactions made each day on TfL services – representing 17 percent of pay-as-you-go journeys. This high level of take-up continues to drive the use of contactless payment elsewhere in the retail, food and leisure industry.
“It is a fantastic achievement to win this award. It recognises all of the hard work TfL and Cubic have put into making contactless bankcard payments on transport in London such a success for our customers. Widespread customer acceptance shows this is now the way forward for fare collection worldwide,” said Shashi Verma, TfL director of customerexperience.”
“This win is the culmination of years of research and a strong partnership with TfL for more than 30 years, as well as a solid collaboration with Barclaycard. The project introduced a ground-breaking new technology that works as it was designed for in a technical, operational and customer perspective,” said Steve Shewmaker, president of CTS after accepting the award. The technology represents the opportunity for a worldwide transformational shift that is revolutionizing the thinking about the need for tickets, and how to achieve interoperability between different public transport operators.”
TfL was the first public transport provider to accept contactless bankcard payment cards and will continue this record of innovation when it begins accepting Apple Pay in July this year.
The UITP award win is the sixth award this year for TfL and Cubic’s contactless bankcard payment, and follows wins at the Contactless and Mobile Awards and the London Transport Awards earlier this year.
Original source: Cubic
