The Hub In-transit

A transport ticketing market opportunity.

Ticketing in the UK is a large and growing market (e.g. 250 million rail tickets per annum). Ticketing form factors are changing and attended over the counter ticket sales are being replaced by alternative retail channels to market such as online, mobile and self-service point of sale programmable device payments such as unattended payment terminals (UPTs), ticketing vending machines (TVMs), and handhelds.

The government backs a proprietary smartcard application called ITSO for concession and a multimodal contactless public transport vision. There are also many other smartcard initiatives appearing that look to include transit. Almost all transport operators are having to look at on board ITSO compliant contactless readers to handle these type of cards.

More recently the EMVs have also decided to enter this market. They are looking, off the back of their own contactless payment card roll out, to integrate with these deployments. TfL have recently announced that their new gates will take contactless EMV payments alongside Oyster as their prepaid proprietary travel card from 2012 and other PTEs have also publicly announced similar ambitions.

What this indicates is that paper tickets will progressively be replaced with closed as well as open loop contactless cards and eventually NFC enabled mobiles. As a result less cash will be used to buy tickets with all the associated benefits related to reduction in cash management costs and fraud.

The Hub in-transit 4P solution:

Using The Hub in-transit solution a traveller could enter a transport terminal, go up to a Hub in-transit UPT and buy or reload their EMV/ITSO card or programmable form factor possibly their phone. They would then go up to the barrier or payment acceptance terminal and make a contactless entry receiving a discount or concessionary pass (ENCT) if deemed eligible. This would be possible based on the multi-application loaded in-transit, onto the card alongside the ticket.

Version 4 of the Hub Platform and UPT solution has taken over £40m in transit ticket revenues and it is still growing. It was the 1st UPT accredited by WorldPay alongside TfL in 2006. The platform also runs an SMS mobile ticketing service. The recently released version 5 of The Hub in-transit platform is also able to remotely accept payment as well as issue tickets from attended or unattended ticketing devices. However, in addition it has been set up to also issue various smart transit form factors as well as personalise NFC mobile phones.

The Hub platform is centrally hosted within a 24/7 datacentre. The hosted solution has been enhanced to manage highly secure and encrypted data to PCI DSS compliance levels where required. This is of particular relevance to card issuance and payment acceptance processing. Unencrypted product and promotional content is also handled within this centralised hosting centre.

The core content is journey planning, payment and issuance. Operator versions of this are drawn via web services from in house ticketing systems. The interface is templated and can be customised to the web service and operator brand. Payment processing can be  from either the merchant processor or other payment processors (e.g. YesPay, Verifone) Some are already already integrated with The Hub platforma dnwhere they are not can be easily plugged into the existing APIs.

The Hub platform, products and services are predominantly sold under what is referred to as a SaaS (Software as a Service) offer. This reflects the fact that we have pre-existing software (and often integrated hardware) solutions available to be deployed immediately. Although customisation is nearly always required it is thought that up to 80% of the set up costs can be removed and speed to market is increased.

The Hub in-transit added value options:

  • Multi-channel – EPOS/UPT/Mobile/Handhelds/On board/Car parks
  • Multi-form factor – Barcode/magstripe/chip with paper/card/ mobile/NFC mobile
  • Multi- content – Advertising/Top up/Products/Loyalty offers
  • Payment acceptance – Cash, contact and contactless cards,
  • Data analysis enabling location based customer relationship management opportunities.

The Hub in-transit benefits:

The removal of cash paper ticketing and say on board processing is deemed to improve customer service by reducing queues and helps meet scheduling expectations. Reduction of cash management costs and fraud related to handling of cash takings is clearly of benefit too. The prospect of both EMV and contactless form factors somehow replacing current ticketing schemes will not happen overnight but the benefits will eventually be irresistible to the customer.