HEADLINE NEWS
UK: Consumers Take to 'Oyster Phone'
O2 led the six-month trial that included service-provider heavyweights Transport for London and Barclaycard. The trial enabled all 500 participants to pay fares on the London Underground, buses and trams using a preloaded Oyster application on the embedded chip. About half, or 225, of users also had a Visa payWave application downloaded to the chip, which they could tap to pay at 4,000 or 5,000 merchant locations. The users also could tap smart posters for information and enter a VIP area of The O2 entertainment venue.
The O2 wallet trial ranks as one of the most significant among the dozens of NFC pilots held since 2005. A publicity coup for telco O2, the popular trial brought together three major players in the ecosystem in O2, Barclaycard and Transport for London, all of whom are keen to roll out NFC service once more phones hit the market. Yet, there was nothing unique about the applications or their implementation in the trial. In fact, users could not even reload value over the mobile network to their Oyster transit purse or view balance of the transit purse or track past journeys or purchases with the Visa contactless application. Despite this and the unstylish clamshell Nokia 6131, the trial was a rousing success with users, some of whom took to calling the handset the “Oyster phone” for the transit application onboard. They didn’t want to give up the phones at the end of the trial, said organizers, quoting surveys. Organizers said transactions did not trail off even after users had exhausted their £50 (US$80) free Oyster value. Those participants that also got the Barclaycard/Visa application got £200 in purchasing value.
More than three-quarters of participants said they would use contactless service on their mobile phones if it were available, according to surveys organizers conducted. About 90% of the 500 trial participants expressed satisfaction with NFC technology, according to O2. About two-thirds of users said they found tapping the phones more convenient than using Oyster cards and about 22% said they increased their number of trips on London’s subway trains. In all, users tapped their phones for 50,000 trips on the London Underground during the trial. About 87% of respondents said the availability of the Oyster service would influence their choice of mobile phones. And while more than two-thirds of users said they would like to have the Barclaycard application on their phones in the future, only 47% said this would influence their choice of phones. Neither O2 nor Barclaycard released the number of retail transactions trial users conducted with the phones.
* Trusted Service Manager: Defined loosely to include companies or other organizations securely distributing, provisioning and managing applications, generally over the air, on secure elements in NFC mobile phones; or licensing their platforms for this purpose.
N/A: Not available or not applicable.
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