On the 31st of October, Fonix and EE hosted ‘The ticket to the mobile payments revolution’. Held at Heddon Street Kitchen, this breakfast event brought together over 40 delegates, all with the desire to explore the potential of mobile ticketing.
The morning featured some excellent presentations (from Masabi, EE, AppyParking and Fonix), a thought-provoking panel debate, some delicious food and even a cameo appearance from Gordon Ramsay.
Here are our top 10 takeaways:
#1 Look at the bigger picture
Giacomo, Head of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships of Masabi pointed out the wider ramifications of making payments frictionless. User experience and customer satisfaction with the payment method is of critical importance, but it isn’t the only benefit of mobile ticketing; queues at barriers could be reduced and the cost of fare collection could reduce, among other benefits. In short, if the tech is good, everyone’s a winner.
#2 “Make Parking Forgettable”
Dan, CEO of AppyParking referenced their company slogan “Make Parking Forgettable”: no one enjoys paying for parking and companies should be seeking to help their consumers forget that they have even been through this process. This highlights an important point across the mobile ticketing industry more generally — whether it’s cinema tickets or paying a bus fare, mobile ticketing needs to be as quick and simple as possible.
#3 Fact!
Dan also mentioned that searching for parking wastes over 550M gallons of fuel (Data from INRIX).
#4 Mobile ticketing stats
Peter Garside, Partnership Lead at EE demonstrated how successful mobile ticketing could be by showing data from its adoption in Helsinki and parts of Italy. Both were adopted in 2012 and by May 2017, were selling well over 500,000 mobile tickets per month. These tickets covered parking, transport, the congestion charge and charging points.
#5 PSD2 and consumer education
Lee Booth CEO of Active Ticketing flagged that with big changes being brought in by PSD2, the UK ticketing market needs to change if it wants to adopt Direct Carrier Billing. For the most part, consumers don’t actually know what Direct Carrier Billing — companies need to get better at educating their consumers. Tim Green (Features Editor at Mobile Ecosystem Forum) agreed that “Some marketing would be nice!”, to allow consumers to make informed decisions and hopefully opt for Direct Carrier Billing.
#6 Ticketing services don’t accept mobile tickets
Anthony Eskinazi, CEO of JustPark stressed that the ticketing industry is not placing enough importance upon consumer convenience. It seems absurd that whilst 94% of people have a smartphone, only a tiny percentage of ticketing services accept mobile tickets.
#7 Consumer experience is key
Dejan Rikic, Co-founder of Apptitude Consulting addressed how the Direct Carrier Billing market itself also has a role to play, if it is to dramatically impact the ticketing industry. It needs to make sure that payment flows are optimised for every possible platform: payment steps need to be down to a minimum, but this cannot come at the expense of secure verification which consumers can have confidence in.
#8 Mobile is ubiquitous
Why not simply use a credit card for payments? This was one of the key questions raised on the panel. After a short debate it was clear that no other payment has as wider reach as mobile carrier billing because mobile phone penetration is at 100% in the UK.
#9 Simplicity, accessibility, choice and the power of the number
The morning came to a close with our own CEO, Rob Weisz discussing the desire of the mobile network operators to provide the flexibility to make sure that direct carrier billing will succeed in the relevant ticketing genres.
Rob went on to talk about the simplicity, accessibility and additional choice that the direct carrier billing can provide will only bring benefits to the ticketing market drawing key comparisons in the charity, gaming and digital paywall sectors where the benefits have already been proven.
#10 Breakfast 🍳🍉☕
And finally…the yummy pastries, bacon sarnies, yoghurt pots and fruit.
A huge shout-out to everyone who attended and a special thank you to our speakers.