NFC TimesThe premier source for news, analysis and commentary on
Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

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.

NFC TIMES Exclusive – At least 13,000 buses in the UK outside of London now accept open-loop contactless payments, and more rollouts are underway as part of a plan by UK bus operators to roll out contactless on all 32,000 buses operating in the UK outside of the capital, NFC Times has learned.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – London transit authority Transport for London is proposing to extend an agreement with U.S.-based fare collection system vendor Cubic Transportation Systems to license the authority’s technology used in its pioneering contactless open-loop payments system.

NFC TIMES Exclusive – Vancouver-area transit authority TransLink is seeing modest consumer take-up for its new open-loop contactless fare payments service and around 6% of the contactless EMV credit transactions are from NFC mobile wallets so far, NFC Times has learned.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Milan is the latest city to enable collection of fares by contactless bank cards and NFC phones, with public transport company Azienda Trasporti Milanesi, or ATM, rolling out the service to more than 100 stations on its metro system. The company plans to expand the open-loop payment service to buses and other surface transport modes it manages.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Vancouver is the latest major city to enable riders to tap to pay fares with contactless bank cards, including card credentials loaded into such NFC-enabled mobile payments services as Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay.  

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Transport for London this week was again trumpeting its move to open-loop fare collection with contactless credit and debit cards and applications on NFC phones–noting that contactless payments now accounts for half of all pay-as-you-go metro and rail rides in and around the UK’s capital.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Visa has formed a unit to promote use of Visa-branded contactless cards and accounts on NFC phones and other devices, seeing an opportunity to expand on the success of open-loop fare collection in London and plans for the move by transit authorities in a growing number of cities, including New York, to accept contactless credit, debit and prepaid bank cards for fares.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority board has approved a long-anticipated contract to enable riders to pay with contactless credit and debit cards, including cards loaded into NFC mobile wallets, by 2019–the largest transit authority to do so since Transport for London launched open-loop fare collection in late 2012.

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.