Asia Pacific's early adopters
Hong Kong was the first to use an RFID smart card system in 1997. The Octopus card is now used by 95% of the population with 11 million transactions daily across metro, buses, ferries and more than 10,000 retail outlets. Many Asia Pacific cities and regions use similar cards. Major cities in Japan have lots of different types of transport cards. Beijing and Shanghai commuters use the Yikatong. Singaporeans use the EZ-Link smart card. Taiwan has the EasyCard and most recently (December) New Delhi's government launched a "Common Mobility Card" called More. New Zealand is looking to launch similar technology to the Octopus in 2012.
The future -- NFC and mobile payments
With advances in NFC technology and strong support from the government, NFC mobile phone payments may replace smart cards across major cities such as Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore because these cities have:
-- A technology savvy urban population with more than 100% mobile phone penetration
-- Governments strongly advocating the use of technology, including NFC, to manage transport
-- An agreement between all local transport companies to take on transport/NFC projects co-ordinated by central government.
Isabelle Alfano, Director of CARTES events, Comexposium, said: "Asia Pacific is way ahead of many countries around the world in terms of using smart cards. As RFID technology expands across the region into the smaller towns and cities it will bring many opportunities for suppliers of this technology. But at the same time, advances in NFC might mean that mobile payments will be the next step, and the general public will use mobile phones to pay for transport and groceries and other utilities.
"With a mature contactless acceptance infrastructure already existing, mass transit ticketing has always been considered as the killer app in market development of NFC before it can be extended to other multi-application uses," added Alfano.
Sources reference: UmmId, Smart Insights White Paper "Transport in Asia-Pacific 2011"
About CARTES in Asia
Date: 28-29 March 2012
Opening times:9.30am to 5.30pm
Place: Hong Kong - AsiaWorld-Expo
Organiser: Comexposium
Website: www.cartes-asia.com
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SOURCE: CARTES
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