Cubic and TfL's Contactless Payment System Wins Back-to-Back Awards

Cubic Transportation Systems and Transport for London’s (TfL) contactless bankcard payment system are the recipients of two awards for Outstanding Project at the 2015 UK Rail Industry Awards, followed by Most Innovative Transport Project at the London Transport Awards.

Launched in 2012, the contactless bankcard system was extended in 2014 to cover London’s entire transit network – including Tube, rail, bus and tram services. The success of the contactless payment project in London is best represented by the 500,000 contactless journeys made every weekday.

TfL’s director of customer experience, Shashi Verma said, “I am delighted the work we have done with Cubic to deliver contactless bankcard payments across transport in London has been recognized with these latest awards. We worked tirelessly together to ensure the delivery of our new convenient payment option was faultless and today our customers are enjoying the benefits with more than 50 million contactless journeys made in just five months.”

John Hill, managing director of Cubic Transportation Systems in Europe said bringing contactless bankcard payment to London was the result of a successful collaboration with TfL and years of research and planning.

“TfL and Cubic worked closely together to solve a number of complex technical and regulatory issues to achieve the contactless innovation.  Since the introduction of contactless, more than 1.3 million unique cards have been registered on the system with up to 30,000 new cards used every weekday,” Hill said.

“The introduction of contactless bankcard payments caused a fundamental shift of thinking from a card reader-centric solution to a back office system. It is clear people are sitting up and taking notice of how London has implemented this change.”

The two award wins come just weeks after the ticketing system was named the Best Bank Card Ticketing Scheme at the Transport Ticketing awards in the U.K. earlier this year.