Bank cards may soon be used for transport fares, Donohoe says

The increased use of bank cards as a means of paying for bus and rail fares is a likely possibility in the near future, Minister of Transport Paschal Donohoe TD said.

“In the last five years we have moved from coins to the Leap card,” he said. “In the next five years we may be presenting our bank cards to pay for journeys.”

Mr Donohoe was speaking at the Transport Payments 2020 Conference in Dublin on Thursday.

All bus services in London are now completely cashless, Mr Donohoe said. “This will probably happen in Ireland at some point in the future,” he said. “We have no immediate aspirations in Dublin or in Ireland to do the same,” said Tim Gaston, head of ticketing and integration measures at the National Transport Authority, on the London bus services going totally cashless.

Forty per cent of bus users still pay with cash, and the NTA has no intention of disenfranchising them through insisting on a cashless system, Mr Gaston said. But reducing the number of cash payments is a medium-term goal.

“For a lot of operators and businesses we speak to, the cost of cash is a message we keep hearing,” said Joe Doyle, senior manager of the National Payments Plan at the Central Bank of Ireland. There are security and transportation costs to cash, and labour costs for counting that cash, so often a card option can be cheaper, he explained.

We will be seeing less cash used in transactions, but cash payments are not likely to cease completely, Mr Doyle said. He pointed to the increased use of Leap cards across Dublin, from about two million transactions per quarter to 17 million.

Over 800,000 Leap cards have been issued since the system was launched three years ago. The National Transport Authority has begun rolling out the Leap card in the cities of Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford. The authority also launched an auto-load feature to top up farecards automatically by a set amount.

Less cash, not cashless

“Consumers are being incentivised to use Leap cards to get fare reductions,” he said. “So I think as long as Leap maintains its pricing model and incentivisation plan, you’ll see more people moving from cash (payments) to Leap (transactions).”

Paying for public transportation in 2020 will be through a combination of Leap cards and bank contactless cards, with cash payments accounting for a small share, Mr Doyle predicted. “The Leap product has worked tremendously well ... it’s likely to continue.”

The vision for transport payments in 2020 is that it will be through a range of different means, said Mr Gaston of the NTA. “(People) will probably still be using cash, but hopefully that will be a small percentage,” he said. Leap cards will still be operating, and mobile phones, contactless bank cards, even office access cards or student matriculation cards integrated with payment functions are possibilities, he said.

The emergence of the bank debit card may help the push towards a universal transport fares payment system. When cities move to enable a bank card option, it will give tourists and visitors the opportunity to use it, Mr Doyle said.