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Cubic: From Oyster Cards to Contactless payments, what's next for transport? Have you ever wondered how the London Oyster Card system was created? Or how it came to be that you could use your contactless debit or credit card to travel around London, and even out to Gatwick Airport? Wonder no more. Hidden away in Salfords, right next to Gatwick airport, is Cubic Transportation Systems (Cubic). While many may not be familiar with the Cubic name, they have been the trusted partner of Transport for London (TfL), Network Rail, and the Department for Transport to introduce the latest transport payments technologies across the UK. In addition to the Oyster Card and contactless payments in the UK, Cubic is also the name behind the ticketing systems in many of the world’s major cities, including Sydney, Chicago, New York and Vancouver. Cubic is the leading integrator of payment and information solutions and deliver integrated systems for transportation and traffic management, through providing tools for travellers to choose the smartest and easiest way to travel and pay for their journeys and enable transportation authorities and agencies to manage demand across the entire transportation network – all in real-time. Cubic’s team keep London and the rest of the UK moving. With over 1000 UK employees, and more than 400 working from the European Headquarters in Salfords, Cubic has been at the forefront of deploying the latest transport payments technologies, including the ability to use your iPhone or Apple Watch to pay for travel even after the device's battery is dead through the Apple transit express programme. In London, Cubic processes all the transactions made for travel, be it at a Ticket Vending Machine, at a station’s fare gate, a validator on a bus, paying for the Thames River Service, or hiring a Santander Bike. On average, over four billion
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Diamond Magazine
transactions take place a year in London, and Cubic ensures you are charged the correct fare and even provide the fare capping capabilities, so you receive your daily, weekly, monthly, or zonal fare cap discounts. It doesn't stop there. Even outside London; most of the UK’s regional train stations will have Cubic gates, so you'll be using Cubic products wherever you go. Cubic even worked with ITSO (a membership organisation which defines and develops the UK-wide technical specification for smart ticketing), to ensure new smartcards other operators bring out, such as The Key by Southern, are supported on its infrastructure. Recently, Cubic has worked with government to help make travel smarter and more digital. This has been a key priority during the pandemic in order to reduce touchpoints across the network. As part of this initiative Cubic has worked with transport operators such as Govia Thameslink Railways to provide barcode-enabled gates to allow areas outside London to swap from paper tickets, to digital barcode tickets that customers can purchase online or through an app. Cu-
Recently, Cubic has worked with government to help make travel smarter and more digital
