Transport for Greater Manchester in the UK is the latest transit agency seeing substantial growth of contactless open-loop fare payments from NFC mobile wallets–with the percentage of its contactless tram trips paid for with Apple Pay, Google Pay and other Pays services more than doubling over the past two years, NFC Times' sister publication Mobility Payments has learned.
The percentage of total contactless trips that customers are tapping for with their NFC-enabled smartphones and wearables reached 39% this month, the agency told Mobility Payments. The other 61% were paid for with contactless EMV debit and credit cards. The trips are on the Manchester transit authority’s Metrolink tram, the largest network of its kind in the UK in terms of ridership outside of London.
That current contactless penetration rate for NFC mobile wallets is up from 18% in September 2019, a couple of months after Transport for Greater Manchester had launched open-loop contactless payments for its tram network. The share of NFC wallet payments hit 30% of all contactless journeys a year ago. (See chart this page.)
