NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Transport for New South Wales, Australia–the transit authority that oversees trains, buses and ferries in and around Sydney–decided to roll out its open-loop payments service to all train services following an extensive trial.
The authority, which announced the new service last week, launched its first trial of the technology in July 2017 on a route of the Sydney Ferries service, accepting only Mastercard-branded cards. It then expanded the trial to all ferry routes and to its light rail service and to Visa and American Express cards in March 2018.
It now has added its most-used train services, Sydney Trains and NSW TrainLink, which together account for around 55% of total trips for the transit authority. The authority, however, won’t extend the open-loop payments system to buses–which make up 41% of trips on the transit system–until mid-2019. And the transit authority is only accepting credit and debit cards from the three brands, Visa, Mastercard and AmEx, although it is considering extending the service to Australia’s popular eftpos debit card system later.
