“We had a very successful event – to cap it all, we won a Highly Commended Award for Ticketing Technology of the Year.”

The Littlepay team had a fantastic time exhibiting at Transport Ticketing Global 2020, the world’s largest gathering for the smart ticketing and mobility community. Over a busy couple of days, we enjoyed meeting a volume of people who share our passion for seamless travel and prosperous, interconnected cities.

Our stand this year showed off an array of hardware options that are integrated with the Littlepay platform, including devices by our long-standing partner Ticketer, as well as SC Soft, ACS, PST, Transmach and Masabi. We gave delegates a chance to tap readers with dummy cEMV cards and see transactions recorded by the Littlepay portal on our big screen.

This was a simple but effective way to demonstrate the sleek interface and features of the portal. Delegates could experience for themselves the ease with which Littlepay merchants can view transaction data, configure product rules, carry out customer service and generate reports.

It was encouraging to find that most of the people we chatted to were aware of our track-record working with several of the UK’s biggest operators and of our integrations with prestigious hardware manufacturers and acquirers.

We were able to fill in the detail, sharing news of the specific benefits our merchants experience – including speedy transaction times and dramatically reduced losses, with 99.8% of revenue captured on average.

Of course, we weren’t shy about letting on that our industry-first ‘multi-operator capping’ technology was a finalist for the coveted Ticketing Technology of the Year award at the Transport Ticketing Awards. We were equally keen to discuss our first deployment outside of the UK and Ireland, bringing contactless EMV payments to Porto’s metro and STCP trams.

This important project, in partnership with CyberSource, Visa, Porto Intermodal Transport (TIP) and Unicre, will go live in the second quarter of 2020, with a roll-out to the entire Andante transport network to follow.

Conference soundbites

Some of our team got to take a break from the stand and enjoy the conference’s keynote speeches and panels. We listened to Britain’s first Minister for the Future of Transport George Freeman pledge to tackle disconnection, digitalisation and decarbonisation, to work towards establishing the UK as a driver of innovation in the global transport sector.

He vowed to simplify ticketing as a priority. Confounded by the ‘chaos of ticketing’ and the difficulty passengers routinely face trying to identify the best value fare for their journeys, he said this would be a key problem for his department to resolve.

Visa’s Head of Delivery for Global Urban Mobility, Ana Reiley, talked about the huge growth of contactless payments and the role of this technology as an enabler of MaaS. Collaboration – between operators, agencies, technology providers and financial institutions – she said, would be the key to developing customer-centred, data-enriched, connected transit services.

Industry goals

What was clear from both the exhibitors and speakers at this event is that the transit sector is on the same page. The language of innovation, evolution and revolution was everywhere. The goals of seamlessness, connectivity, interoperability, inter-modality were widely shared. There was a sense of a collective vision to make travel simpler, easier and quicker.

For our part, we’ll keep doing what we do well. We’ll continue to develop our agile platform, adding technology to our stack as we identify more ways to bring value. We’ll carry on expanding our portfolio of device partners and integrated acquirers; working with them to bring seamless payments to new geographies.

Award recognition

In between two days of exhibiting, the Littlepay team headed to the Science Museum for the Transport Ticketing Gala and Awards.

With aircraft suspended above us in the dramatic space, it was an ideal setting in which to honour innovation in technology. We were thrilled to accept a Highly Commended award for Ticketing Technology of the Year for our Tap On, Tap Off multi-operator contactless ticketing scheme on buses in Sussex, Kent and Surrey.

We share the award with partners Ticketer and Hammock.

Our CEO, Amin Shayan, says,

“We had a very successful event, with many interesting meetings and conversations. To cap it all, we won a Highly Commended Award for Ticketing Technology of the Year.”