Why Public Transport Authorities Need to Embrace the MaaS Opportunity

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By Phil Sealy | 1Q 2019 | IN-5380

With the shift away from personally owned transportation modes, mobility as a service (MaaS) and mobility on demand (MOD) are considered increasingly more critical in order to offer a seamless commuter experience alongside the rise of use cases including ride hailing, e-scooters, and bike sharing.

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MaaS Is Coming--Are Public Transport Authorities Ready?

NEWS


With the shift away from personally owned transportation modes, mobility as a service (MaaS) and mobility on demand (MOD) are considered increasingly more critical in order to offer a seamless commuter experience alongside the rise of use cases including ride hailing, e-scooters, and bike sharing.

This is clearly where the public transit market needs to head, i.e., toward embracing the convergence of publicly and privately owned transportation modes.

Public transport authorities (PTAs) need to start embracing this paradigm shift in order to place themselves at the center of the MaaS opportunity via the creation of centralized mobility platforms where multiple transportation services, whether PTA or privately managed and owned, can be consumed, using mobile as the centralized market entry point.

MaaS Enablement Will Require a Radical Rethink as it Relates to Customer Ownership

IMPACT


MaaS/MOD enablement is extremely complex, requiring PTAs to integrate and partner with multiple third parties such as rental car vendors, ride-sharing ventures, and hotels.

PTAs are perfectly positioned to leverage and recycle vast data mines related to their commuter bases, encompassing location, preference data, and payment information. Through these analytics, this information becomes a monetizable asset with which PTAs can not only improve their own ticketing solutions but allow other transportation vendors to plug into as part of a wider MaaS solution as well.

This, in turn, will shift market dynamics and the customer ownership paradigm, where sharing and the willingness to share the customer relationship between several entities, all offering services from one centralized platform, will be a key future requirement.

From a PTA point of view, this will require a radical shift in thinking, considering that up until now the PTAs have been in full control of the customer relationship through the issuance and management of closed ticketing systems.

In certain cities, like London, this shift is already starting to happen, coinciding with the rise of OEM mobile wallet use on PTA systems, including Apple, Google, and Samsung Pay, but further customer ownership dilution is a likely requirement to bring a true MaaS platform to market.

ABI Research believes that sharing the customer relationship should be viewed not as a negative, but as a tradeoff, where sharing the relationship can be compensated by a host of positives, including scalability; service extension; and access to new partnerships, business models, data points, and end markets.

Recommendations for PTAs

RECOMMENDATIONS


The Path to MaaS will not be an overnight success but will be achieved via staggered strategies geared toward an ultimate goal of MaaS enablement. There are a number of considerations that PTAs need to take into account and hurdles  to overcome. With that said, ABI Research has pulled together a number of recommendations from which PTAs can use as stepping stones in order to place themselves at the center of the MaaS opportunity:

  • PTAs should first and foremost drive the move from closed- to open-loop systems or those with multiple device acceptance capabilities and mobile for the following reasons:
  • To enable access to new markets that previously remained out of reach
  • To provide a platform to add value
  • To open new partnership opportunities
  • To set the foundations for the wider IoT and smart cities opportunity and put into motion the stepping stones towards mobility as a service enablement
  • There will be no ticketing silver bullet in the short term in terms of media or technologies. Coexistence and choice expansion should be the ultimate goal of a PTA to ensure maximum exposure to emerging areas, including smart cities.
  • The ticketing market will shift away from a pure authentication play towards one of multiple interactions and touchpoints between PTAs and commuters.
  • Focus should be placed on offering a platform from which authorities can gather valuable data points and analytics on its customers, bringing the authority closer to end users.
  • In turn, this will help PTAs optimize and provide targeted added value via the launch of new innovative services and a platform from which new allegiances and partnerships can be enabled to help authorities flesh out future strategies and ultimately open up new revenue opportunities and business models via campaigns, marketing, and loyalty.
  • PTAs need to embrace this paradigm shift while placing themselves at the center of the MaaS opportunity via the creation of centralized mobility platforms where multiple transportation services, whether PTA or privately managed and owned, can be consumed.
  • PTAs need to understand that the customer ownership paradigm will shift, sharing between a host of other complementary service providers all offering services on a single centralized platform as ticketing redemption shifts towards MaaS.
  • PTAs should not resist the advances of leading OEMs and their respective open-loop mobile wallet platforms. Ultimately, they will help bring new services to market, with PTAs able to leverage the OEMs’ scale and coverage.

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