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 tra ic 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 a er 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 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

Cubic is continuously looking for talent to help build out the next innovations

bic has an impressive system testing area in the European Headquarters, where they conduct rigorous so ware, and hardware testing for all these technologies and can even do testing for specific gate lines around the UK without the need to go out on the field.

Cubic also supports the work of our customers worldwide by project managing and developing the next generation of technology that is getting implemented right now in cities such as New York. For example, you can now pay using contactless payments and even virtual smart cards integrated into mobile wallets. So, no need to worry about forgetting to bring your MetroCard; you can use what's already in your pocket, your phones to pay and go using your smart card.

Cubic has really come a long way from transitioning from paper tickets to smart cards, to contactless payments and now even mobile ticketing, so what's next? Advertising is becoming an exciting proposition for many industries out there, so why not bring it to transport. Imagine if travellers could be incentivised to travel based on the needs to optimise the transport network, would they change the time they would travel, to get rewards which could be redeemed for discounts for travel or even buy a co ee? Cubic is continuously looking for talent, to help build out the next innovations like all those mentioned in this article.

To find current roles please visit their website: www.cubic.com/careers