MOBiNET is the Europe-wide e-market place of mobility services for businesses and end users. MOBiNET enables interoperability among EU mobility services in terms of payment, billing and clearing through a dedicated component capable of managing financial transactions for membership and business fees.

Service/app provider can use the Billing platform component facilities in order to enable end-users (B2C) and businesses (B2B) to pay for the use of applications, services and data. A concrete use case is the parking payment interoperable service developed by Pluservice, the Hungarian National Mobile Payment Pld. (NPC) and North Denmark Region. This integration allows for example PluService customers to buy parking service in Hungary using their application. A standardised common interface to Parking service providers as well as to resellers published to the MOBiNET market place, will create a truly interoperable EU-wide parking solution.

The MOBiNET payment and billing component handles all financial transactions and provides a neutral instance which monitors those transactions between different parties.

All fees due to MOBiNET are determined and configured by MOBiNET administrator (for subscription, for clearing services in B2B2C, etc.). Each Service Provider determines the price and the fare rules for its services; the amount is distributed to the MOBiNET billing component at each event relevant for billing purposes.

 Figure 1 – logical architecture

Billing component is designed for a general purposes e-market place:
• B2B: Buyer pays at sale (e.g. with credit card or paypal), periodic payment with SEPA
• B2C, Payment may take place: on line at product sale, with credit card or PayPal; at the end of the month with direct debit (SEPA).
• B2B2C: each consumer continues using the app of his/her Service Provider (on a broader area), paying as usual and receiving the invoices from the same Service Provider. MOBiNET billing component: analyses cross-provider logs and calculate the amount due among Service Providers (clearing) and the fee for MOBiNET itself; generates reporting for Service Providers, invoices and SEPA files for direct debit.

Interoperable parking payment service

The multi-service Application myCicero (www.mycicero.it) developed by PluService represents a use case that can benefit most from MOBiNET and in particular from its payment and billing features. It is based on a technological platform that merges several services. Among the services provided the booking and ticketing services like Local Public Transport, Coaches, Parking, Bike-sharing are already used by end-users and mobility operators. Within the PluService platform, the traveller can benefit of a virtual personal assistant, including a multimodal journey planner with booking and payment facilities.

The myCicero application will be connected to a range of applications, enabled by MOBiNET.

Figure 2 – Multi-service App enabled by MOBiNET
As a concrete demonstration of the potential of MOBiNET, an EU-Interoperable parking payment service is developed and made available in the MOBiNET service directory. The service provides a common interface to Parking Service Providers as well as to Resellers to create truly interoperable parking solutions. The target is to propose an EU-wide standard parking service interface to be used within MOBiNET and beyond.

Although it is a demo service, the plan is to have a fully functional integration behind. This integration will allow myCicero users to buy parking service in Hungary (via National Mobile Payments) or North Denmark Region parking service using their usual application. In this case the payment will be done via myCicero, and the MOBiNET Billing component will do the clearing among the parties. As MOBiNET providing the platform, any registered MOBiNET user will be able to discover such interoperable service, which is a very important change in mindset.

The benefit for the users is that they only need to subscribe once to the parking service and they can continue to use the usual payment method, even likely via their usual mobility provider as clearing can be done between providers within the MOBiNET machinery.

This service, in a possible future commercial operation, might also become one of the B2B enablers that the MOBiNET platform will offer to its business users, thus becoming a core service of the MOBiNET platform. This is by design a B2B solution, so any service provider can publish or consume parking services via this interface. This will open the market for many companies to provide a common parking application – integrated into their mobility application – to be used Europe wide for its customers. This would also not be possible without a Europe wide mobility platform such as MOBiNET.

Source: Paper “EU-wide interoperable payment services”, Guido Di Pasquale, PluService, Italy

To read the full paper, click here

This paper was presented at the 11th ITS European Congress, Glasgow, Scotland, 6-9 June 2016