Many things changed during COVID: the Japan scene, the transit scene, the payments scene. Reader interest in what I was writing about pretty much evaporated in 2023, never to return. Just as well, it was the end of an era and I don’t do video content. I was already posting much less frequently than I used to and want to focus on temple work and other projects. Going forward I’ll keep the Apple Pay Suica help desk guides up to date and, occasionally, post mobile transit Suica 2.0 news, but most posts will be Buddhist related.
I’ll also be migrating from wordpress.com to a cheaper Japanese hosting service in August so there might be some access issues when switching over. Some older post images might take a hit, we’ll see.
But let’s ask THE question one last time: is open loop really going to be a better business model for big complex transit companies that have to make a profit? Like JR East? What I find fascinating are the questions that ‘IT journalists’ never ask. Their closed loop ‘cost saving’ hidden assumption discussions really belong to publicly run transit ticketing systems like Oyster, Opal and MTA. None of those systems ever got their native MIFARE based transit cards running on mobile, only plastic. Going EMV open loop was the easiest way to go mobile. Letting EMV card issuers take over the plastic issue costs, the mobile issue costs, all while passing card support costs to the banks (“we don’t know anything about that transit charge on you card, call your bank.”) was a win. Understandable when you are a government run public transit agency that doesn’t have to turn a profit or offer reward points. Leave that to the credit card payment networks. Everybody assumes this same situation applies to a transit company that has been running a mobile transit business platform since 2006 with reward points (JRE POINT).
Open loop doesn’t work well,with complex fare structures and doesn’t work at all when seat reservations and other extras are involved. Shinkansen will never be open loop, so that removes any possibility of Shinkansen to open loop transfer gates. Which leaves us with rail lines that don’t connect with JR Group lines. But for the sake of fun pretend you are a JR East bean counter doing a cost analysis of open loop. Which works better for you? Lots of small EMV open loop transit gate transactions with fee overhead or occasional EMV transactions when recharging Mobile Suica with all the transit gate transactions processed in house? And don’t forget that those open loop transactions don’t feed the JRE POINT business side, going to the bank card point program instead (unless they are a JR East VIEW CARD).
So there you have it. I hope a better writer than me answers those questions…someday.