UPDATE: Hong Kong OCL officially announced Apple Pay Octopus
One downside of breaking a tech story on the internet is news aggregator sites. Responsible tech news sites like MacRumors and AppleInsider post outside sourced news that serves their readership and sends traffic to the original source. And then there are not so nice aggregator operations posing as news sites like The Verge, TechCrunch and 9to5Mac who craft crappy posts, lifting whole chunks from outside stories, or simply lifting without attribution, minimizing any outside contribution to keep traffic on their own site.
So it’s a bummer that SC Yeung’s excellent EJ Insight story “Why Hong Kong can expect Apple Pay support for Octopus Card,” quotes the 9to5Mac ripoff of my piece instead of the original, but it’s an interesting read with good analysis. Yeung makes the same point I did a few months ago that the expansion of Octopus to Apple Pay is an important step forward for the platform. But it can’t stop there: Octopus Cards Limited needs to continue digital wallet expansion and create new business opportunities. Unfortunately it has to accomplish this while parent company MRT Corporation is opening up its transit gates to QR Code and EMV payments which will compete with the subsidiary OCL Octopus card business:
MTR will begin accepting QR code payment starting from next year and the rail operator will also add more contactless payment systems on its gates in future. For commuters, Octopus Card will no longer be the only choice for MTR payments…
<It> is becoming clear that <OCL> needs a new business model to maintain its market-leading position. Using a specific card for payment is no longer a modern way of payment. The core issue for Octopus is transform into something bigger, moving beyond the current payment functions and offer a lot more, perhaps even a mobile banking service, to retain users.
Why HK can expect Apple Pay support for Octopus card
JR East has taken a very different approach. Suica is a central business pillar and JR East will be expanding it with the next generation Super Suica in April 2021. Suica will gain the ability to virtually host other transit card under the same Suica umbrella on plastic and on mobile. Think of it as a national transit and payment card with Express Transit anywhere, anytime. How fascinating it would be if Octopus had a similar kind of opportunity to expand outside of Hong Kong.
Even from the short vantage point of 2.5 years since the launch of Apple Pay Suica, it’s already easy to see the charges that it has brought to the Japanese payments market. It will be interesting to watch the changes that Apple Pay Octopus brings to Hong Kong.
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