On 22 Dec, 11:58, Matthew Dickinson
wrote:

I think the long term aspiration for both TfL and the Evening Standard
is to move away from issuing physical plastic or holding money, and to
instead install account based applications on third party payment
cards.

That makes some sense but it does also throw open the doors to a whole
hoard of other questions.

An obvious issue is that of suitably compatible equipment - in the
future if Visa payWave/ Mastercard PayPass contactless cards were to
be accepted in place of an Oyster card at Oyster terminals then
obviously said terminals would need to either be very significantly
modified or (far more likely) simply replaced.

Also, would passengers then be able to use their contactless card for
paying for travel in London from the outset or would they need to
register or activate them first? Whilst the idea that they were ready
to be used 'out of the envelope' might be attractive, there are a
number of issues such as the contractual question of a passenger
having to agree to the T&Cs of the public transport operator in
question (e.g. TfL); the passenger having an understanding of how to
use the system correctly (e.g. the need to touch-in *and* out);
associated with that the passenger having an understanding of the fare
structure; the question of what happens if a contactless card holder
is abusing the system (currently RPIs can and indeed do confiscate
Oyster cards); the cost of processing each transaction whenever the
card is used to pay a fare to the operator (e.g. TfL) which is not
present with prepaid cards (such as Oyster); the issue of how any
problems might be resolved if, for example, an overpayment has
occurred (at the moment Oyster customer services can simply refund
passengers - in the future would people be calling their bank if such
problems occurred, and would the bank's customer services people have
the vaguest clue of how to deal with such issues).

The existing Barclaycard "OnePulse" card sidesteps all these issues as
the Oyster element is quite separate from the payWave and conventional
credit card elements - in essence the OnePulse card merely plays
'host' to an integral Oyster card (obviously it's a bit more complex
than that as I *think* both the payWave element and the Oyster
element are dealt with by the same multi-function RFID chip, and the
designers had to ensure that the payWave Oyster elements don't
interfere with one another at all). The Oyster account is very much
separate from the credit card account - one can activate the Oyster
auto-topup function to take money from the credit card account when
the Oyster balance is running low, but this is no different to what
one can do with a standalone Oyster card and a separate credit/debit
card anyway. And if people have any problems with the Oyster element
of the card then they merely need to deal with the Oyster customer
services people.

One other big advantage of TfL holding the money is that they get to
benefit from the interest on it, of course!

I'm not for a moment suggesting that in the future contactless payment
cards such as payWave and PayPass won't be integrated into the
infrastructure of public transport smartcards in the future, merely
that what might on the face of it seem a simple and obvious thing to
do is betrayed by the complexity of many of the issues which lurk
beneath!