Checkout Trends in Transit

7 min readDec 2, 2020

Before COVID, When it came to public transport we were OK to pay with cash for transit tickets and didn’t think about hygiene when touching keypads on ticket vending machines or queuing up to buy a ticket. After COVID studies showed that that virus can persist on surfaces like metal, glass and plastic for 3 days depending on the conditions.

This lead to a massive behaviour change because in most cases this contact could be avoided. This concern led to a massive surge in Google search interest relative to all other topics worldwide, hitting the highest possible increase of 100 in the middle of March.

World Health Organisation suggested to use contactless payment methods when possible to reduce the risk of transmission. A study by thefutursitgroup.com reported a 26.6% increase in consumers indicating that contactless is a crucial feature when choosing a credit card and at the same time UK reported a 50% reduction in the use of cash due to COVID.

Since this is evident that digital is the future, transport agencies and app developers are placing more emphasis on customer experience to make it easier for customers to travel. A study by Visa suggests that transit authorities spend 3.5 times more on the physical fare collection versus digital fares, this is a because of a combination of various factors including shorter reconciliation times, less accounting errors, no need to travel to the bank to deposit money which results in a lower risk of cash related crime.

A report from UK finance 45% of passengers would feel more positively towards public transport operators if contactless was introduced. Offering a fast and frictionless payment experience is a compelling for customers, businesses and the government all at the same time.

Customers are able to save time by not queuing at the the stations to buy tickets which helps business improve customer experience and comply with the governments regulations to avoid crowds.
With digital tickets there is reduction in theft and pilferage of cash as cash does not exchange hands, which reduces the boarding time reduces the risk of transmission.
Digital payments also help make public transit more attractive and convenient for younger generations whilst increasing the sustainability of your city.

Source: Master Card Payment Gateway Services

But, all of this revolves around digital maturity of a country, not everyone can take on this bandwagon. While the digitally advanced countries where payment infrastructure and systems are in place and adaption of these technologies is higher we can leverage from all these benefits, at the same time it is difficult for digital maturing and cash centric countries life Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa to make the most out of this.

Before COVID, getting the train or bus and reaching their destination on time was probably the only thing that mattered. Travel has changed as we know of it because of COVID, people’s willingness to use public transit have decreased. Data from Transit app showed a 58% reduction in ridership compared same time periods last year, and

Transit companies had to restrict the number of people in each carriage to abide by the social distancing rules imposed by most governments.
In most countries people were advised not to use public transport for non essential travel.
For some cities public transport came to a complete halt.
WFH became the new normal and most people work in the CBD’s they stopped travelling and transit companies were forced to pause their period passes and in some case refund money to customers amounting to millions of dollars worldwide.

The primary driver for that was passenger safety and to combat with this decreased ridership, transit companies had to find ways to ensure that customers knew it is safe to travel back on public transport.

Wear a face mask — Except for a very limited exemptions passengers are required to wear a facemask throughout their journey.

More cleaning, more often — There is more focus on cleaning and sanitising the carriages and busses and transit authorities are putting extra focus on communicating this out to restore trust.

Practise good hygiene — There is increased focus on washing and sanitising your hands and keeping distance where possible, which eventually reduces the number of people who can travel on a carriage.

Stagger your travel — There is an increase in advice on travelling outside peak times where possible to avoid people

Apart from transit companies we saw a digital shift to make transaction experience better across the industry.

Google maps are used daily by over a Billion users worldwide to get their transit needs fulfilled. During COVID Google has rolled out additional features designed to help travellers.

COVID Layer — This new layer overlays vital statistics about the area you area you are in without leaving the maps app so you are more contextually aware, this has already helped over 10 million people get critical information about COVID-19 right from google maps.

Occupancy Information — With real-time passenger occupancy information right in google maps you will start seeing how crowded your bus, train or subway line is to make a better travel decision.

While google is adding new features to google maps, people still have to use merchant apps to actually purchase transit tickets.

Earlier last week Google introduced a revamped version of Google pay focusing on the transaction experience and reducing app fatigue. With this new version of Google Pay app developers can aggregate access to services and activities into one super app which reduces that need for people to download and add their payment credentials on different apps and pay using their existing funding sources within google pay.

Google wasn’t the only company to change the way people used their products, a study done by PYMNTS found out that the use of Apple Pay for POS transactions has risen by 59% amid the pandemic.

Generally Apple devices require a user to wake or unlock their device using biometric authentication and most Apple devices sold in the past couple of years use facial recognition to unlock the phone, this became a bottleneck for people using Apple Pay for transit payments as biometric verification does not work with a mask on.

Express Checkout — Apple has fundamentally changed their checkout process to facilitate travel by introducing express checkout. Once you setup a card for express checkout you don’t need to wake or unlock your phone and can complete a transaction by bringing your phone near the terminal and feel vibration to complete transaction. Express checkout works with Power Resrve mode meaning you can even use it when your phone runs out of battery. TFL and First Group are among the first ones to start using it in the United Kingdom.

QR Payments — Apple had abandoned a patent a couple of years ago “Effecting Payments using Optical Coupling” which describes a secure transaction without direct communication of sensitive data between the users device and a retailers platform, essentially allowing the users to use QR codes for payments this was revived with the launch of iOS 14 earlier this year.

Since contactless is not supported by every retailer as they don’t have NFC enabled terminals this could be a game changer for merchants who are not looking to replace their existing infrastructure and still offer the convenience of contactless payments.

The thing we know for sure is that digital payments adaption is on steroids and smartphone is becoming ubiquitous, and mobile payment adoption is skyrocketing.

The growth of Fin-tech has been a gradual over the past decade, but COVID has proved to be an enormous force of bring change in financial services over the past couple of months and with no obvious end to this outbreak it won’t be wrong to say this has ticked the contactless payment boom in the world.

Sources

Checkout Trends in Transit

Written by Ahmed Khalid