Singapore Transit Rolls Out Visa On SimplyGo Contactless System

The Land Transport Authority of Singapore now includes Visa cards in SimplyGo, its contactless payment system.

According to a report in ZDNet, Visa said the project with Singapore’s Land Transportation Authority is one of its biggest rollouts of contactless payments, with 30,000 acceptance points. With SimplyGo, commuters can use a Mastercard or Visa contactless bank card or mobile phone to pay for transportation. All users have to do is tap it on the fare readers when boarding.

“By opening up contactless acceptance for transit, we are removing friction from the travel experience, eliminating the need for Singaporeans and tourists to wait in line to top up their stored value travel cards,” Visa Country Manager for Singapore and Brunei Kunal Chatterjee said in the report. “Visa will continue to work closely with our partners to streamline the payment experience at all touchpoints across Singapore to make it seamless and convenient.”

Visa said Singapore is one of the leading markets for contactless penetration, and more than 80 percent of the payment company’s transactions there are contactless. That is expected to grow with the Land Transportation Authority rollout, noted the report.

This isn’t the only thing Visa is doing in the contactless payment for transit space. In February Visa and Planeta launched new technology that speeds contactless payments for mass transit and lowers the cost for transit organizations and operators to offer that payment option. In a press release, the companies said the Visa Secure Access Module (SAM) helps those enterprises facilitate contactless payments through contactless cards, phones and wearable devices.

Visa noted that it has, over the past year, helped launch contactless transit solutions in 20 cities in 12 countries, with 150 projects currently ongoing. For mass transit — upon which tens of millions of U.S. consumers rely daily — the path to contactless payments has largely been set by Transport for London, which operates mass transit for the U.K. capital. That has set the stage for transit systems to roll it out all over the world.