CHYPlog

NFC Research Report

New report for the Department for Transport (DfT) reveals how mobile phones can be used for public transport ticketing. Near Field Communications (NFC) technology will enable passengers to use their mobile phones to hold smart tickets, new report claims Download Full Report

Smart ticketing

The Department of Transport (DfT) has released its report on "The benefits and costs of a national smart ticketing infrastructure". The report, prepared by Detica with support from Consult Hyperion, and released 14th September 2009, is available to download from the Department for Transport website here: http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/regional/policy/nationalsmartticketing/ and is an initial high level review of the capital and operating costs, and tangible and intangible benefits of a national smart ticketing scheme, based on experience with existing local schemes. The report shows that there is potential for significant benefits to passengers and public transport operators. There are also significant up-front costs and some on-going costs, but assuming full take-up of the scheme it represents high value for money. You might also like to know that the DfT has a consultation open until the end of October on the subject of smart and integrated ticketing, including the potential use of mobile phones. If you are interested in the topic, take a look at the consultation document, which explains the concepts of smart and integrated ticketing, summarises the current smart and integrated ticketing schemes in England, outlines the department’s vision for the future of smart and integrated ticketing and seeks to learn the consultees’ views on the subject and how much involvement they feel the Department should have in implementing such schemes going forward. You can also respond to the consultation via the DfT web site.

OECD Webcast

Consult Hyperion were retained by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) in Paris to prepare a paper on regulatory issues in mobile banking, noting the complex relationship between choices made in technical architectures and the options for industry structures that result. This work is input to the Joint workshop organised by the OCED and the Information for Development Program (infoDev) / World Bank in Paris on September 10th and 11th. You can watch the workshop live by webcast. Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion will be speaking in the mobile banking session.

Events

A jolly good Fellow

Visa Europe (Visa), the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (CSFI) and Consult Hyperion (CHYP) are pleased to announce that David Birch (Dave), one of the founders of Consult Hyperion is to be appointed the Visa Research Fellow in Payments at the CSFI for 2009.

In this part-time role, Dave will co-ordinate a research programme looking at the process of innovation in payments. The goal will be to bring together the technology timeline, business drivers and social and cultural trends to construct a useful roadmap of the European payment market over the short, medium (5-10 year) and longer terms. This will be achieved using a combination of well-known road mapping techniques and innovation-based analysis specific to the financial sector. The reason for adopting this approach is that it is clear that there are different dynamics to the technology, business and cultural drivers around payments. These dynamics make it difficult to determine the new products and services in the payments space that will be successful in given timeframes. This research programme will attempt to understand enough about the innovation process in the financial sector to develop a road map that captures the cumulative evolution of technology, the drivers across the coming business cycle and the key European social and cultural trends. This road map will then be used to identify a number of paths, directed by open and shared learning about previous innovations in the payment sector, that will help European financial institutions, regulators and technology suppliers to guide their investments in new payments products and services more effectively.

Could you be a privacy test-bed?

The ‘Visualisation and Other Means of Expression’ project (VOME) is a £2m project co-funded by the Technology Strategy Board, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council. Consult Hyperion is participating in a collaborative project with researchers from the Information Security Group (ISG) at Royal Holloway, University of London, consent and privacy specialists at Salford and Cranfield Universities and Sunderland City Council, to explore how people engage with concepts of information privacy and consent in on-line interactions. The research will be put to the test in real life scenarios; one of the project partners, Sunderland City Council, has commenced implementation of a regional, federated identity initiative for the north-east of England, enabling citizens to gain access to shared services provided by the public and private sector. The Council will work with the VOME team to produce a new set of tools – such as role-play games or narrative puzzles - to help youth support workers clarify how the information will be used and safeguarded in the hope of engaging more young people.

National NFC infrastructure

The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) is the national information and communications industry champion, the national strategic planner and developer, and the Government CIO. It has a straightforward goal to cultivate a vibrant and competitive information and communications industry in Singapore—one that attracts foreign investment and sustains long-term GDP growth through innovative infocomm technology development, deployment and usage—in order to enhance the global economic competitiveness of Singapore. One specific area where the IDA is active is in helping industry to develop interoperable infrastructure, thus maximising the net welfare. This is why the IDA determined that near-field communication (NFC) technology might be of strategic interest. With handsets due to enter the market in 2009, the IDA decided that 2008 was the right time to explore the commercial deployment possibilities. They decided to do this by looking at the global market to see what lessons could be learned and by running a series of stakeholder workshops in Singapore. The IDA chose CHYP to support it in this project. Suat Hong Koh of IDA explains: “We needed consulting support from an organisation with practical experience in developing NFC strategies for all of the stakeholders: not only government, but mobile operators, transit companies and banks.”

The Digital Money Summit

Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion will be speaking at the Economist Conferences' The Digital Money Summit. In addition to Dave, leading industry figures along with editors and analysts from The Economist Group will lead discussions on how and where digital money is most likely to succeed and be profitable. Learn from pioneers in the field how they’ve tackled obstacles to success, and how they read the future. Do come and join Dave and other Consult Hyperion experts at The Digital Money Summit at The Dorchester in London on 25th November 2008.

Consult Hyperion begins real-world trials of the world's first NFC mobile phone to be certified for ITSO Media

At the recent Transport Card Forum meeting in London, CHYP's Public Sector Commercial Manager Mike Burden described how Consult Hyperion, transport consultancy MVA, technologists ESP Systex, mobile operator O2 and the NowCard scheme in the North West have joined forces on the first-ever live ITSO Near Field Communications (NFC) trials for public transport ticketing. The Department for Transport (DfT) has funded this research project, with 36 'trialists' currently using mobile phones to pay for bus tickets in Blackpool. ITSO is the specification supported by the Department for Transport (DfT) for interoperable contactless smartcards.
"Increasingly, the data transfer made possible by NFC will take the form of secure payment and ticketing transactions, since NFC phones can be set up to deduct funds from the user's bank account, or stocked up with credit in advance," said Burden. "Since most people carry their mobiles every day, whether they have cash on them or not, the type of transactions made possible by NFC represent a wide variety of possibilities in terms of mobile payments and ticketing."
The ability to use mobile phones as a means for downloading and holding public transport tickets will deliver greater convenience for customers by eliminating the need to queue at the ticket office, and will deliver reduced ticket issuance cost for operators. In addition, the user interface capabilities of the phone will give users the ability to view their journey history and remaining credit at any time. Consult Hyperion is one of the few independent organisations in the world to be working with mobile operators, the GSM Association, chip manufacturers, application developers, public sector bodies and the European Commission in this area. Our independence, combined with in-depth technical knowledge, is important to the Department for Transport (DfT) because it enables Consult Hyperion to identify and select the most innovative and highly skilled best-of-breed partners.
Live trials of this technology – part of a DfT-funded technology research project launched to investigate and demonstrate the viability of using an NFC phone as an ITSO ticket carrier – are already underway in the North West of England under the NoWcard scheme with two different bus operators. By using NFC technology in place of cards, bus drivers can validate pre-paid bus tickets that have been stored on users' mobile phones. The user benefits from the convenience of the phone as well as being able to use the phone display to check on the remaining balance on stored value tickets. The project's first milestone was the certification of the Nokia 6131 phone by ITSO to enable it to be used in live schemes. As such, the Nokia device is able to interact with all existing ITSO card readers, which means that no new investment in infrastructure will be required by ITSO members (which include bus operators, train companies, suppliers to the industry, and local authorities) to accept NFC phones as well as cards.
The on-going research project represent a further continuation of the DfT’s ambition to investigate new technologies in order to provide greater convenience across its public transport network. The objective is to evaluate NFC-enabled devices – as well as new functionality within ITSO – in order to gauge whether:
• The carrier device is able to hold ITSO-compliant public transport tickets• Remote retail devices will be able to sell ITSO-compliant public transport tickets over a mobile network• A 'validator' device is able to validate ITSO-compliant tickets stored on other media via the NFC interface.
Participants were instructed to use the phone for travel, and to engage in a number of activities including the use of Stored Travel Rights, Top-Up Vouchers, and special Youth Concessions. Phase Two of the project, which is already underway, is looking to assist the DfT and ITSO in enhancing the ITSO specifications so that NFC devices can also be used to validate and issue smart tickets to ITSO cards. This work includes the development of multiple prototype terminals and potentially further live trials.

Barclaycard mobile contactless propositions

CHYPpings Summer 2008: Barclaycard (part of Barclays Group Plc) is one of Europe's leading credit card and consumer lending businesses, with over 40 years' experience in that business. With over 18m cardholders globally and 95,000 retailers in the UK, as well as a rapidly growing partnerships business and a heritage of innovation; Barclaycard remains well placed to grow and shape the payments business in the future. Barclaycard has a track record of harnessing new technology to enhance the customer experience at point of sale. Having been through a smooth transition from magnetic stripe to chip & PIN, the arrival of contactless smart cards provided a new opportunity to create a faster and more convenient service, and Barclaycard have been amongst the first to exploit it for both their consumer and retail customers. In 2007, they launched the unique OnePulse card that combines a chip & PIN Visa credit card with a PayWave contactless Visa interface and a contactless Oyster interface to deliver a "three in one" card for Londoners. The OnePulse card, in combination with the roll-out of contactless terminals across London has become the springboard from which Barclaycard will continue to issue millions of contactless cards from 2008 onwards. Barclaycard's new technology roadmap highlights mobile as a key platform for future customer propositions and they have engaged Consult Hyperion to help them to develop these propositions where mobile and contactless come together to create a new and compelling customer experience, through the use of near-field communications (NFC) technology, from whiteboard into customers' hands.

O2 trial results are released

One of our most exciting projects over the last year was working with O2, providing both mobile transactions consulting expertise and NFC development skills to their London "O2 Wallet" trial. In this trial, 500 Londoners were given Nokia 6131 NFC phones that had a Visa payment application and Transport for London Oyster application on board. The results were unequivocal. Nine out of ten participants were happy using NFC technology on a mobile phone and 78% said they would be interested in using contactless services. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the pervasive use of Oyster cards in London, almost nine in ten of the trial participants said that the availability of the Oyster application would influence their future choice of mobile phones. This is an astoundingly positive response to new technology. We were delighted to have been chosen by O2 to support them in this work: the payments and ticketing applications ones that have to work out in the real world, on public transport and in shops around London and Consult Hyperion's considerable experience in practical, efficient design and development of transaction services contributed to a groundbreaking trial. You can download O2's detailed result from our web server here.