Germany’s largest rail system soon will finish a three-year mobile-payments test at its stations and officially offer all passengers the ability to pay for tickets using mobile phones.
The Deutsche Bahn AG, Germany’s main railway operator, announced Aug. 29 it will offer Touch and Travel ticketing at its 320 rail stations by Nov. 1.
Riders will have the option to use Near Field Communication chip on their phones to pay at the terminal or use the phone’s camera to capture an image of a two-dimensional bar code provided at the terminal at the beginning of the route and another at the end of the route to determine the fare, Deutsche Bahn states in a press release.
The mobile phone stores ticket information and payment data, and the Touchpoint terminal transmits billing data to the rail company’s billing department for monthly billing to the customer, the company states.
Berlin-based Deutsche Bahn says it has been testing the Touch and Travel format since 2008. United Kingdom-based Telefonica Europe PLC, London-based Vodafone Group PLC and Deutsche Telekom AG, Germany’s T-Mobile company, are partnering with Deutsche Bahn for the program. NXP Semiconductors N.V., based in Eindhoven, Netherlands, manufactures the Touchpoint terminals, NFC World reports.
The number of available NFC phones has not increased as was forecasted when the rail system began its pilot testing in 2008, indicating it will still take time before the NFC function tied to Touch and Travel system becomes the norm, suggests one industry expert.
“The biggest issue is the lack of NFC phones; it’s just coming along slowly,” Zil Bareisis, a London-based senior analyst for research firm Celent, tells PaymentsSource. “Those in the production of NFC [phones] predicted it would be a boon by 2011, but they have had to slash those predictions from 70 million users to 40 million users [worldwide].”
The weak economy is not to blame, Bareisis contends. “I think it is more about the uncertainty of how NFC will develop, and the acquirers and merchants will wait until it is firmly in place,” he says.
Deutsche Bahn also says it recently began working with Rhein-Main-Verkehrsverbund, the transportation authority for bus, subway and rail service in the Frankfurt region, to make Touch and Travel compatible with Rhein-Main’s own NFC-based HandyTicket service.
Bareisis views the creation of such agreements as another major challenge facing transportation industry companies seeking mobile payment options for their riders.
“Getting all of them to work together can be very hard,” Bareisis says. “Imagine any big city, say New York, with different rail systems with different fares and pricing structures, and you try to agree on a common fare system.”
London provides a good example of that sort of collaboration, though its Oyster contactless payment system is based on credit and debit cards, Bareisis says (
Deutsche Bahn launched the Touch and Travel application for Apple Inc. iPhones in January and followed it with an application for phones using Google Inc.’s Android operating system in July, the company reports.
Deutsche Bahn created the Touch and Travel concept to make purchasing a train ride a quick transaction, Bareisis says.
The transaction can be completed quickly, but the passenger still has to have a phone out and make sure the Touchpoint worked properly, or the bar code photo and scan worked, Bareisis says.
“It seems like a lot of fiddling around to me,” he adds.
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