Smart City Expo World Congress Barcelona 2023

Tapping, typing, accepting...
In our fast moving world, digital and electronic payments have made purchasing easier and faster.
And when it comes to the smart city industry, they're becoming crucial in smart mobility to enable solutions, with EV charging, tolls or mobility-as-a-service.
It's all about lowering friction and allowing for more seamless travel.
So for public transportation, it can be as easy as just walking up to a turnstile or a gate and tapping your card or your mobile device to keep moving rather than going to a ticket vending machine and slowing down.
In private mobility, it can be as simple as walking up to a bike or an e-bike and starting your ride in 10 seconds rather than downloading an application or putting in your user credentials.
And in the automotive world.
It can be as simple as a parking space, knowing when your car is sitting in it and that it's charging you for the time where you happen to be occupying that space.
So there are many ways for that to happen in a in a way that is just easier for the user.
MasterCard is trying to bring to the smart mobility table their previous experience in retail.
So being able to buy anything anywhere with the same card.
The idea is to have that in mobility.
So tapping into all transport services with a credit card or phone instead of having to go to a ticket office or machine and queue.
This model is already being used in London's tube, where riders tap in and out and the fee is automatically calculated and charged.
In general, mobility is becoming a focus for MasterCard.
I think one of the biggest ones is going to be in vehicle commerce.
I think the fact that we've worked on a program with Ride and Mercedes-Benz to allow Mercedes Fuel & Pay, you just pull up next to the fuel pump, your car recognizes that you're there, you authenticate with your fingerprints and your car handles the payment.
I think if you think about how that might expand over time, if I pull into a park and ride, can my vehicle pay for not just my parking, but also my journey?
Could it pay for takeaway food?
Could it pay for tolling?
I think that's going to fundamentally change the way people move around urban environments, and it's a very exciting new technology.
The data that is gathered by these companies is also proving its value for government and private use cases that go beyond smart mobility.
Yeah, I think two other areas where we're quite strong are in disbursements.
So if the government needs to disburse a social benefit to users, we can help them do that very efficiently.
I think the other way is data.
I did a project with the city of Dublin.
They were trying to measure the economic impact of an American football game that took place there.
And so we helped them say, did it drive American tourism?
And if so, how much, when, where, what industries?
And so I think that was critical and they used that to inform their decision about whether to host an American football game the following year.
And so I think that the power of our data, understanding where people are spending at what times of the day in what industries is incredibly powerful for governments to understand so that they can serve the needs of their constituents most effectively.
Partnerships with innovative mobility startups are key for MasterCard to unlock the full potential of electronic and digital payments.
One of the companies MasterCard has partnered up with is Ubirider, a Portuguese company we’ve featured in previous videos as they created a mobility-as-a-service app where riders can plan and pay for all the services of their trips.
They also create tools for transport operators who are adopting the mobility-as-a-service model.
With that partnership, they developed the possibility for Ubirider users to pay through the app by tapping the phone on the machine.
Payments is a very complex area.
Before Ubirider, when I started Ubirider, I got the notion that payments will be the key to unlock the potential of our mobility-as-a-service.
We got amazed because we were not aware about how many players are on each transaction that we do in the supermarket and there are a lot and each one doing different things.
So we need a lot of players to do what we are doing, to simplify the process, to build a mobility account for the users so they can centralize all the payments that they do for mobility, car parking, charging a car, a bus, a train, whatever, everything connect.
And all of that is because the contact points of all of us with the business is the payment, is the payment.
So and we intend to use the payment as the credential, the payment as a source of information, of data, and also payment as a key for the interoperability of everything that is necessary to be done.
MasterCard's presence at the Smart City Expo and Tomorrow.Mobility, as well as their investments in partnerships, are proof of the importance of the smart city and smart mobility sector for the payment industry, proving business potential.
It's also a sign that we're going to be seeing more of these solutions around the world.
As more mobility solutions become smart, electronic and digital payments are crucial to enable them.
In this video, we interview Chapin Flynn, Senior VP of Urban Mobility at MasterCard, and Paulo Ferreira Dos Santos, CEO of Ubirider, to discuss the role of electronic payment companies in smart mobility and other smart city use cases, and the MasterCard-Ubirider partnership to enable mobility-as-a-service.
Watch the full story only on Kurrant.