Apple Enables Virtual SmarTrip Fare Card for Apple Pay in Washington, D.C., with More Closed-Loop Transit Cards Expected This Year in U.S.

_{(This premium article was originally published September 2020 in Mobility Payments’ sister publication NFC Times.)}

Apple added support for its latest closed-loop transit card for Apple Pay, enabling customers of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, or WMATA, to tap their NFC-enabled iPhones and Apple Watches to pay for rides with WMATA’s SmarTrip virtual card.

WMATA had announced the plans to participate in Apple Pay last December and had said it would happen during 2020. The transit agency at the time said that it has plans to launch a SmarTrip application for Google Pay this year, as well. A spokeswoman for WMATA confirmed to Mobility Payments’ sister publication NFC Times that “customers who use other devices likely won’t have to wait long before they are experiencing the same level of convenience and safety.” 

WMATA ranked as the second largest heavy rail (subway) system and fifth largest transit system overall in the U.S. last year, providing a total of more than 340 million trips.

There was no mention this week of any plans by WMATA to enable open-loop payments with contactless EMV credit and debit cards and EMV card credentials on NFC devices, unlike in such U.S. cities as New York, Chicago, Portland, Ore. and Miami, with contactless plans in such cities as Boston and Dallas. WMATA had planned to be one of the first cities to support open-loop payments in the U.S. more than five years ago, but cancelled the project. 

While support for open-loop is definitely a trend in the U.S. and globally–following the success of the large open-loop rollout in London more than six years ago­–some transit agencies are opting to promote and expand their closed-loop fare payment systems. The agencies balking at open-loop say the option is expensive and does not eliminate the need for maintaining their established separate closed-loop card systems for customers who have no bank cards or don’t want to use them for fares. In addition, it’s more difficult to support concessionary fares for senior citizens, students and disabled persons with open-loop cards. 

Other Virtual Closed-Loop Cards Expected
As NFC Times has reported, transit officials in Los Angeles and San Francisco are among those that are revamping their fare-collection systems but not introducing open-loop payments–at least for now. 

For mobile payments, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or Metro, will instead be enabling its TAP closed-loop cards for both Apple Pay and Google Pay by the end of the year. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in San Francisco confirmed that the agency will enable a virtual Clipper card in the Google Pay wallet. It wasn’t clear if it would do the same for Apple Pay, but that is likely. 

Mobile wallet providers, such as Apple and Google, have been seeking to enable applications other than credit and debit cards to make their wallets more useful. Transit payments has been a key priority.

In the U.S., Apple Pay also supports the closed-loop Hop Fastpass in Portland, Ore. Globally, riders can tap to pay fares with such closed-loop transit cards as Suica in Japan, Octopus in Hong Kong, transit cards in Beijing, Shanghai and other T-Union-compliant cards in China.  

Google supports Suica and the Hop Fastpass, as well, in addition to cards or closed-loop ticketing in Melbourne, Australia; West Midlands, UK; and Las Vegas, Nev. And Google has a deal withU.S.-based CubicTransportation Systems, the largest automated fare collection vendor globally, for the vendor to enable its transit agency customers to add their closed-loop transit cards to Google Pay. Unlike Apple, Google usually supports the transit cards without an embedded chip, although it uses one in Japan. 

Cubic, which manages the SmarTrip card program, helped implement the virtual SmarTrip cards for Apple Pay and also a separate SmarTrip app.  

With a virtual SmarTrip card on the embedded chips in NFC-enabled iPhones and Apple Watches, users are able to tap their devices to pay fares in WMATA’s 91 Metrorail stations and all Metrobus routes, along with regional bus routes and parking lots and garages that WMATA oversees. Apple has extended its Express Transit feature to the virtual SmarTrip cards. It enables users to pay without unlocking or waking up their devices or authenticating themselves with Touch ID, Face ID or passcodes. They can even tap if their devices have run out of nearly all of their battery power. For the latter feature, they would need to be using the iPhone XS, XR, and newer iPhones, which have the Power Reserve function.

Users, however, can only use the same SmarTrip card on one device, either phone or watch, and they can’t add an existing physical card to a device and then continue to use the card.  

Reloading on Phones
WMATA said in an announcement Tuesday that users can reload value onto the closed-loop virtual card with Apple Pay, which would use credit or debit cards they have stored in their Apple Wallet for retail payments. Or they can add funds in the separate SmarTrip app for iOS and add it to the virtual SmarTrip cards on the iPhone or Apple Watch. Users also can buy 7-day passes in the SmarTrip app and move the passes to the virtual cards, though they can’t buy passes directly in the Apple Wallet. And they can set up autoload, check balances and manage transit card benefits, if they receive them from their employer, in the separate SmarTrip app, as well.  

Cubic in a statement Tuesday noted that the Covid-19 pandemic has “proved that there is a critical need for contactless payment technologies, especially within public transit.”  

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