Japanese media reports that Singapore TransitLink has gone all in with EMV contactless for transit with the SimpleGo program starting today, April 4. Mastercard is the first credit/debit card approved for the program with Visa to follow later this year. Using bank cards for transit is what Transit for London (TfL) has been doing for years with other transit systems such as Taiwan MTR adding support recently.
The Japanese report also mentions that EMV contactless cards loaded in Apple Pay/Google Pay/Samsung Pay etc. will work but judging from the Apple Pay experiences during the long beta test period, it is slow and not as reliable as EZ-Link transit cards.
There is no mention of the native EZ-Link transit card being hosted on digital wallets. I suspect that Singapore’s decision in 2009 to dump FeliCa for their own CEPAS technology could make that difficult as CEPAS use is limited to Singapore, and there is no business plan attached to sell the technology in other markets which FeliCa (Sony) or MiFare (NXP) do.
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