NFC Times Exclusive – NFC mobile transit ticketing–an application that once held much promise but has shown few results over the past decade–finally appears to be pulling out of the station, getting a boost from the growing interest in open-loop fare collection, the emergence of the “Pays” mobile payments services and increasing efforts by standards makers to solve basic interoperability problems between NFC phones and transit terminals.
The prospects for rollouts of NFC transit ticketing are also expected to benefit from the greater availability of embedded secure elements in smartphones, especially in China, where the launch of Apple Pay and other mobile payments services has spurred Chinese OEMs to order the chips.
The long-term goal of backers of mobile-NFC transit ticketing is to enable global interoperability of the technology, enabling travelers to load and spend tickets in the various cities they visit.
