Rome Operator: Covid Accelerates Demand for Contactless but Customer Habits Hard to Change

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The CIO of Italy’s largest public transit operator, ATAC SpA, said the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated demand for open-loop contactless and mobile payments, but added that old habits are hard to break for customers and use of cash and paper tickets are still popular. 

ATAC, which is also one of the largest transit operators in Europe, introduced open-loop payments in 2019, and plans to expand use of the technology to other transit modes and possibly to cover payments for mobility-as-a-service apps. 

“Yes, in the end, it’s sad to say, but we have seen, of course, a boost in the usage of the technologies due to the Covid,” said Francesco Amendola, who heads ICT for ATAC, speaking at a recent Transport Ticketing Digital virtual conference. “We had already started our EMV project before COVID at the end of 2019. And what we’ve experienced is that the ratio between the EMV users as compared to, let’s say, the traditional paper-ticket users increased during the COVID period. They (customers) appreciated that they did not have to deal with the self-service machines or to go to a shop to buy a ticket. (Instead), they had their credit card in their wallet.”

Amendola, responding to a question from conference moderator Tim Jefferson, head of UK-based consultancy The Human Chain, noted that use of cash and paper tickets remains a challenge for ATAC’s open-loop payments service.

During a six-month period in the past year, Amendola said that no more than 20% of riders used electronic payments while the majority of people, around 80%, used cash. Regular ridership from contactless EMV payments is still believed to be much less than 20%, however. 

ATAC launched contactless EMV payments about 18 months ago on the Rome Metro and certain urban commuter rail lines, and is expected to expand it to other modes, such as buses. ATAC also provides mobile ticketing using QR codes. Automated fare-collection vendor Vix Technology has said it implemented mobile ticketing for ATAC. 

I would say it’s a cultural heritage, it’s a legacy,” Amendola said of use of cash and paper tickets, while noting that the digital payments infrastructure has been available to customers to move off of these payments means for a long time. “More and more, we have to shift those people toward the digital payment for many reasons, not only in terms of cost, but also accuracy of the accounting and reducing risks and many other advantages.” 

He stressed, however, that changing customer habits is “really hard.”

Perhaps one contactless product that is not growing due to the pandemic are monthly passes that customers can use by tapping their contactless EMV credit or debit cards on contactless EMV gate readers.

ATAC was one of the first transit operators in Europe to implement open loop monthly passes. The service enables customers to tap their EMV payments cards to use monthly passes if they had used the same contactless card to buy the monthly pass–say over the internet. ATAC keeps an updated whitelist of card numbers of current monthly pass holders loaded on its contactless EMV terminals. The service isn’t available with credit or debit card credentials stored in NFC smartphones or wearables. Italy-based transaction processor SIA assisted with the EMV monthly pass implementation.  

While customers have been using the monthly passes with their bank cards, Amendola acknowledged that it’s not the best product for ATAC to promote during a pandemic–since many employees are still working from home, perhaps only going to the office two to three times per week.  

“So probably many users are prepared to have the pay-as-you-go service,” he said, noting that the biggest category of users of EMV fare payments have been businesspersons and tourists. Of course, ridership from both of these categories of customers, among others, has fallen substantially during the pandemic.

But one of ATAC’s strategies is to add more kinds of passes that are usable with EMV bank cards, so that customers “can have just one” transportation card in his or her wallet, which would be a credit or debit card. 

Amendola said the agency plans to enable users to tap their bank cards to pay for their entire families. At present, only one user can pay with a given card or card credential. And for people without credit or debit cards, especially students, the agency plans to enable customers to use prepaid (EMV) cards and what he called “digital identity cards.”  

In addition, the city of Rome has a plan to promote rollouts of mobility-as-a-service platforms, which could enable customers to use one app to pay fares not only for public transit, such as metro, bus and tram, but also for such other mobility providers as car share, bike share and scooter share,” Amendola said. 

He didn’t specifically say that ATAC would enable use of contactless EMV to pay for MaaS services, such as with monthly passes, but that is what another Italian public transit operator, ATM, serving Milan, says it plans to do. The IT and ticketing director for ATM said at another virtual conference that he sees EMV payments as “one of the bricks” in its budding MaaS platform.  

Besides Amendola and Jefferson, Carme Fabregas, CTO and innovation officer for ATM Barcelona; and Enrique Fernandez-Pino, senior partner of the Digital Works Group also participated in the virtual conference, held last week. 

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