Worldline, the European market leader in payment and transactional services and Trapeze, a leader in intelligent transport systems, have  developed a truly hands-free payment solution that allows passengers using public transport to pay for their ticket by automatically detecting their entire journey using Bluetooth.

The service has been designed to address the issue of increasing numbers of passengers using public transport and harnesses the power of technology to remove the need to ‘physically’ buy a ticket. The service delivers a truly seamless journey across all public transport of any city or region and improves operational efficiency for the transport company.

How does it work?

The system operates by ‘detecting’ passengers via Bluetooth when they enter any public transport vehicle. From these detections, combined with transport network data, check in and check out taps are created in order to obtain the whole passenger journey. Best tariff calculation including fee capping functionalities is applied to finally tigger the related payment using passenger account information. Passengers are able to check their journey and fare at any time via the solution’s mobile app.

The system incorporates a broad range of functionalities including the detection of smartphones in the transit system, general smartphone travel authorisation, journey construction, lowest fare calculation, payment processing and customer relationship management.

The hands-free ticket payment solution is the result of combining automatic passenger presence detection in transit services with core account-based ticketing functionalities. The service has been made possible using Worldline’s cutting-edge Tap 2 Use solution to handle the journey processing and the passenger’s account management and Trapeze’s ComfoAccess facilities to manageBluetooth-based automated passenger recognition and virtual validations generation.  Passengers can now avoid queuing for a ticket or to top-up their card needed to validate their journey.

A seamless journey experience

This new way of paying to travel on public transport ensures the simplification of the passenger’s journey with a truly open loop system that is able to handle multiple identification channels, including contactless EMV, mobile ticketing and automatic detection, on one system.