Making the Case for Standardization in MaaS

The vision of a truly seamless age of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is coming into focus. But for many stakeholders in the traditional transport world, how to get there remains a blur.

Services from ticketing to loyalty schemes are increasingly converging onto mobile, and innovative new form factors, applications and services are emerging rapidly. As a result, demands of today’s digital travellers are at an all-time high. But, for many in the transport world, keeping up with the pace of more advanced, inclusive and better-connected services is causing more than a few headaches.

In this new era of connected mobility, there’s a real opportunity for stakeholders to enhance offerings and tap into new revenues. But the convergence of multiple players and industries is posing major technical and strategic challenges. To truly meet the levels of innovation delivered in adjacent industries – and, crucially, the expectations of consumers - transportation needs a new approach.

Openness will be central to realizing the full potential new age of MaaS. But to best understand why, its worth reviewing what’s driving this change and what’s creating the challenges.

The MaaS mindset

From how we pay and communicate, to what we watch and listen to; the dramatic evolution of consumer behaviour in recent years is changing how transport services need to be delivered and consumed.

The “MaaS mindset,” as I like to think of it, is shaped by these changes. We’re all operating more globally, with our physical and digital lives becoming inextricably entwined. Traditional local service providers need to think further afield and more “phygital” - how can existing services be complemented by digital ones, for example?

Services are also increasingly expected here and now, wherever and whenever they’re needed. Driven by the growth of smartphones and the likes of Amazon, Netflix and Uber, the modern consumer is demanding services that are consistent, seamless and ubiquitous.

Tomorrow’s transport

Trust and convenience underpin everything, with the consumer sitting at the heart of innovation. The everyday traveller is no longer patient and reliant on public transport services. Instead, we must consider the needs of the consumer, and how transport ticketing sits among a whole host of other trusted services.

MaaS needs to be more than just offering a means of getting from A to B. As a quick (and certainly not exhaustive!) checklist, Public Transport Authorities and Public Transport Organizations can consider the following:

• Journey planning
• Personalized services
• Loyalty schemes
• Contextual mobility (offering, for example, local travel services and a hotel with a flight booking)
• Seamless transactions
• Device agnostic support or BYOD

Consumers want to travel with minimal effort and planning: booking a hotel and connecting travel simply, with a free loyalty-scheme coffee en-route and live updates and travel times.

Fare-centric needs to become consumer-centric. But how can traditional transport players best adapt? And, what’s been holding them back?

Bridging the innovation gap

For the last few decades, proprietary solutions have dominated transport ticketing – the service at the heart of mobility services. Highly customized, complex and expensive, these solutions have proven to lack flexibility at any upgrade such as new fare policies, smartcard features, acceptance of other form factors or adding any new features to the system. Tied to single vendors, operators have also faced high costs and a speed of upgrade dictated by their vendor. All in all, not a recipe for innovation…

Enter, open standards: a proven approach to resolving such fragmentation, preventing overlap of work, and facilitating better collaboration, innovation and technology advancement.

MaaS requires the collaboration of many players to truly be a success; standardization is the perfect platform of interoperability to facilitate this across borders and industries. Longer term, migration to a standardized ecosystem also brings a better economy of scale, cost savings, and legal protections including liabilities, privacy compliance and patents. Not to mention that new vendors are empowered to compete in an open playing field, encouraging more competitive offerings and the advancements of new technologies.

Several industry players are already championing this move to openness, and OSPT Alliance is one organization leading the way.

Who is OSPT Alliance?

OSPT Alliance is a global member association that brings together stakeholders from across the mobility services ecosystem. It owns and manages the CIPURSE™ Specifications, a set of freely-available technical specifications initially defined to form the basis of more secure, innovative and interoperable public transport applications.

Having matured in the transport world in the past decade, the association’s cornerstone standard has now become the open standard for transport ticketing. The CIPURSE standard, however, has applications far beyond across ID, access control, payments and more. Completely hardware-agnostic, it can be used in any ecosystem and market: making it perfect for the future of mobility services.

Transport remains at the heart of OSPT Alliance, but it is committed to embracing this rapidly transforming industry and enabling it to thrive. As such, it has broadened its mission to enabling the future of mobility services with a common secure platform fit for both the traditional transport world and new mobility stakeholders.

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Philippe Martineau

Philippe was elected as President of the OSPT Alliance Board in 2018. He is currently vice president of Ecosystem Business Development at Rambus, where he is responsible for bridging Rambus’ core technology with the mobile world. His career started with the emergence of mobile technology in the early 90s, where he contributed to the GSM standardization bringing SIM technology to the market.