Robbing bus drivers of their takings from bus ticket sales is apparently a big problem in parts of Sweden, so much so that they stopped selling tickets on buses. But now they’ve switched to an sms based ticket system where punters get sent an sms with an expiry time built-in.
I assume this is going to lead to a spate of bus hijackings, where robbers will steal everyone’s mobile phone, as passengers are guaranteed to have one if they’re on the bus.
That aside, such small experiments as these are pointing the way to the future, where the mobiles will increasingly become the standard way of paying for small transactions and perhaps larger ones too, until cash becomes a thing of the past. Certainly, I think the days of coins are numbered in developed nations and in no longer than 10 years, if still in circulation at all, will be about as useful as a groat or florin today.
The only real question that remains as far as I’m concerned is will operators claim a slice of this high volume, low margin pie, or will they allow a cheeky little upstart to steal it from under their noses by maintaining their extraordinarily high cut of the transactions they enable via premium sms. It’s all very well making hay while the sun shines in a business context, but I think the clouds are coming and they need to seriously think about reducing margins before it’s too late.
One of the lessons of the last 10 years is that when change comes, it comes mind buggeringly quickly. So, now’s the time to start taking a fairer share and justifying their place in the value chain.
Do I have any particular payment alternative in mind? Nothing specific, but I can feel the changes in the ecosystem. Next year will be a watershed for mobile payments in the same way that 2006 has been the time when mobile marketing finally really started to happen.
I’m pretty sure it’s quite a fair bet that everybody in Scandinavia in a bus, on the street, etc. already has a cell phone
Ville - you’re right of course, but I just thought the idea was vaguely amusing.
Russell
The Dutch regional rail/bus service Norordned pioneered this years ago whereby LogicaCMG built a system that allows passengers to buy their tickets via web or IVR as a text based SMS containing a one-time code that they show to the guard on the train. Its very successful and I thik has expanded to encompass the national train service. I have a video explaining the service I can dig out for you if you are interested.
I also worked on some similar trials using SMS’s containing 2D barcodes for transport authorities in Berlin and SNCF in France as well as some similar concepts in the UK. The main problem here is the old story of conflicting standards for extended SMS support in various handsets (Nokia Smart Mesaging, vs EMS vs none)…
We are also working in this area using normal mobile phones to interact with the back-end accounts behind travel smartcards. My bet is that NFC contactless cards will eventually be intergrated into the fabric of the phone, but its a while off yet…
Simon Cavill
Mi-Pay Ltd
[...] Of course, just because the outcome of this survey was patently predictable, doesn’t mean to say that its conclusion is invalid. As I wrote earlier this week, the current share of PSMS is unfair and needs to fall if operators are to maintain a place in the mobile payments value chain. While their huge slice of the action can perhaps be justified while they are both payment enablers and the principle marketing channel, they might be able to get away with this. But with the rise and rise of off-portal, the marketing role is no longer going to necessarily be valid, making it increasingly difficult to maintain these kinds of margins for payment provision. [...]
Hi Russell and all readers of MobHappy
Good news from Sweden… Thanks for covering the story.
Simon - you’re correct in that such a payment system has been deployed in the Netherlands for trains. That is actually not the first. Austrian trains have offered mobile phone ticket sales (initially on WAP) since January 2001.
One might suggest that a train ticket is not quite the same as city public transportation, but even that was done long ago before Sweden. In neighoring Finland, Helsinki Public Transportation introduced SMS based ticketing in December 2001 and today reports that 55% of all single tickets to trams and the underground are sold via SMS ticketing.
PS - I had mentioned both of these (the Austrian train tix and Helsinki public transport) among the 170 mobile service concepts in my second book, M-Profits, the book on making money with mobile services…
Nice to see the idea spreading (and loved the joke Russell, about next robbing the phones…)
Tomi Ahonen
blogsite http://www.communities-dominate.blogs
website http://www.tomiahonen.com