The Smart Card Alliance's 2009 Payments Councils Summit was held in Salt Lake City at the end of February 2009. The primary focus of discussion was the adoption of contactless electronic fare collection in major U.S. cities. The SCA's Transportation Council listed many accomplishments and elected a new steering committee and officers.
Reports of headway made into contactless adoption in the transit arena were presented by representatives from the cities of Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Tuscson, Ariz., as well as the state of Utah.
Craig Roberts, the Utah Transit Authority's Program Manager for Electronic Payment, is the new SCA Transportation Council Chair.
He said, "We are seeing more transit agencies understanding the security and convenience that accepting contactless credit and debit cards directly as fare payment brings to travelers, as evidenced by the presentations we heard at the summit."
Transit systems seem to be the vanguard for contactless both in this country and abroad. "Accepting contactless bank cards means the transit operator acts like a merchant - selling transportation to the customer," said Randy Vanderhoof, Executive Director of the SCA. "They avoid all the overhead of converting bank issued currency (cash or card sales) into transit currency for using the system."
Vanderhoof noted that this is a new frontier for the bankcard and transit sectors. "The technology issues are pretty much solved, but the cost of converting the transit reader infrastructures and fees associated with bankcard usage and bad debt are still being worked out by both industries," he said.
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