NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – While Australia is the top market worldwide for use of contactless bank cards at retail, any hopes for those same open-loop cards and card credentials on NFC phones being used as part of a nationwide, interoperable transit payments service have been dashed for now.
That is after the country’s No. 2 city, Melbourne, last week followed through on long-held plans and launched Mifare-based closed-loop payments through Google Pay, while shunning open-loop payments. That runs counter to support for open loop by transit officials in other large Australian cities, Sydney and Queensland, including Brisbane. UPDATE: But likely key to the decision by Melbourne not to support open-loop payments is the fact the agency would have had to spend a lot of money to upgrade its acceptance terminals to accept EMV credit and debit cards, and it's terminals are not yet due for replacement. END UPDATE.
A spokeswoman for Melbourne-based transit agency Public Transport Victoria, or PTV, told NFC Times that the authority has no plans to support open-loop payments. It would have been too expensive, and also wouldn’t support the type of discount fares that PTV’s closed-loop myki service does, she said.
