YouTuber Suit Train explains the ticketless Eki-Net way of transit ahead of the June 27 system renewal and great big 70% reduction of station ticket agents and service windows by 2025. There are some interesting bits: credit card only jR East ticket kiosks (1:20 mark), and Eki-Net Shinkansen eTicket purchase and gate entry (3:40~5:15). The whole point of his video is that paper tickets are going away. Nevertheless when a platform escalator stoppage prevents him from making a reserved train…paper tickets come to the rescue.
Credit Card Only Ticket Kiosk
Mobile Suica: the definition of cardless transit
The entire video is 45 minutes long but everything after the 17:46 mark later is him explaining the details on a white board in his patented spontaneous ‘one take, no overdub’ video style. And even then he still gets 100,000 views in less than 12 hours. Not even out of college he already has a career…and a gold VIEW card.
A recent sudden surge of hits from Hong Kong accessing my December 2019 UWB Touchless Mobile FeliCa post seemed odd. I dug around and it appears that Hong Kong MTR, like JR East, is making noises about incorporating UWB technology in next generation transit gates.
Apple only mentioned UWB Touchless at WWDC20 in connection with digital car key without showing anything because the Car Connectivity Consortium Digital Key 3.0 spec was a work in progress. Now that the spec is in-place with BMW said to deliver car models incorporating UWB Touchless this year, will Apple show it in action? I think it’s highly likely, but since Car Key is a ‘Wallet Card’, and Wallet app Express Cards come is 3 types: Transit, Student ID, and Car Key, the more interesting question is…will Apple also show Touchless Transit and Student ID Express Cards? And what about Apple Pay?
People think Touchless is a completely new thing for ‘keep smartphone in pocket’ transactions, and they worry about security. You can’t blame them because marketers are selling the in-pocket payment experience. However, Touchless is simply long distance NFC without NFC. All UWB Touchless does is describe the frequency to use Bluetooth instead of NFC. The background stuff, secure element and so on, is exactly the same. This means user interaction is the same. For walking through transit gates and security doors, or unlocking your car, the convenience of Touchless is easy to understand: no more NFC tapping, just keep moving.
What about Express Card payments? The current Apple Pay Suica payment checkout experience: the user taps Suica on a touchscreen, or tells the clerk “Suica” then holds the device to the reader. The user has to give consent before the transaction is activated by checkout staff or the self checkout reader. For Apple Pay EMV transactions users have the extra step of confirming a transaction by Face ID/Touch ID to complete it.
Realistically however, in what situations does Touchless make store checkout more convenient and faster? Drive thru certainly, supermarkets…maybe, but most stores will probably not want to invest in Touchless without a good reason when the NFC readers they already have installed get the job done. There is one more interesting role that Apple has planned for UWB however, one that promises to improve the entire Apple Pay and Wallet experience: communicating with the reader before transaction to select the right Wallet card for the job, at a distance, for a truly smart Wallet app. With national ID cards, passports and more coming to Wallet at some point, UWB could be the Wallet reboot we really need.
And then there is EMVCo. The problems with UWB Touchless for EMVCo are that: (1) Touchless only works with devices with batteries, á la AirTag, and doesn’t work with the current plastic card model, (2) UWB + Bluetooth level the digital playing field with FeliCa and MIFARE, no more ‘real’ vs ‘who cares’ NFC hardware flavors to split hairs over. The plastic card NFC limitation is probably a bitter pill for everybody but especially for EMVCo members and issuers as plastic card issue is big business, and many customers are more comfortable with plastic cards. For those reasons I think EMVCo will be the last to support UWB Touchless, if they do at all. On the plus side Touchless does give digital wallet platforms an edge to create smart aware wallets, digital does NFC and Touchless, plastic only does NFC. We’ll find out about Apple’s UWB Touchless roadmap at WWDC21.
The April 30 addition of iPhone 12 lineup to Rakuten Mobile marked the transformation of Rakuten Mobile into a first tier carrier on the same level of Docomo, KDDI au and SoftBank. Now that SoftBank is taking Rakuten to court over allegedly stolen SoftBank corporate secrets, I think we know who is feeling the pressure. It is the end of an era. SoftBank was the first carrier to launch iPhone in Japan back in 2007 when NTT Docomo refused and KDDI au could not (the Verizon iPhone problem). They cleverly used iPhone to leverage their position from an industry also-ran into a serious first tier carrier grabbing marketshare for the other majors.
Rakuten Mobile is now playing the hungry upstart with fresh ideas and aggressive plans: pay for what you actually use instead of paying for a monthly allotment just like the good old land line days…how original. Nevertheless SoftBank feels threatened not only by Rakuten Mobile but the total weight of the Rakuten Empire: Rakuten Pay which encompasses Rakuten Edy and Rakuten Suica, and most of all, Rakuten Point.
SoftBank has similar parts, PayPay and TPoint/TMoney (the latter is living on borrowed time), but they are not well integrated across the SoftBank empire and more importantly, they don’t have the synergy of Rakuten. The Rakuten Point synergy works across online shopping, online travel booking and online trading…and now mobile. That’s why people in their 20~40’s are sometimes referred to as living in the Rakuten economic zone, leveraging Rakuten Point as currency ‘plus’ to make their real money go much farther for all of their needs.
But there’s one more thing. Now that Rakuten Mobile has the full iPhone lineup, it’s only a matter of time before Rakuten Edy and Rakuten Suica join Apple Pay. That is SoftBank’s true nightmare.
If you use JR East regularly a BIC CAMERA VIEW card is the best investment you can make. So I was pleasantly surprised when the Crecolle (credit-kore) site posted a very useful piece about using Bic Camera VIEW card and Apple Pay. I love it when Japanese credit card sites analyze every reward point possibility in detail. The deep dives are always surprisingly useful.
BIC CAMERA VIEW is a dual function card that grafts a VIEW credit card with a Suica. The Suica part works just like any plastic Suica. The only difference is that users can setup the VIEW card part to auto-charge the Suica part at a VIEW kiosk, they can also setup the VIEW to auto-charge a completely separate plastic Suica, very handy. BIC CAMERA VIEW is also a BIC CAMERA store point card. When you add it to Apple Pay only the credit card function is added as QUICPay. The card comes in VISA and JCB credit flavors, mine is JCB so I can recharge my Wallet Suica with Apple Pay.
To test BIC CAMERA POINT reward rates, the Crecolle staff ran 4 purchase patterns with the same battery item:
Apple Pay BIC CAMERA VIEW QUICPay
Apple Pay BIC CAMERA VIEW QUICPay + showing the plastic card for BIC CAMERA reward points
BIC CAMERA VIEW (plastic credit)
BIC CAMERA VIEW (plastic Suica)
The return rates printed on the receipts showed the following:
1% BIC CAMERA POINTS
8% BIC CAMERA POINTS
10.5% BIC CAMERA POINTS
11.5% BIC CAMERA POINTS
So the lesson here is that if you want maximum points when buying at BIC CAMERA, use the plastic VIEW Suica. Why the big differences? The 8% vs 10% difference is the Apple Pay margin. The #1 and #2 difference between Apple Pay VIEW QUICPay by itself and showing the plastic card is simply that the BIC CAMERA point card is not hosted on Apple Pay as a NFC VAS rewards card. If it was you could do what you do at LAWSON: say ‘Apple Pay’ so that the purchase amount is rewarded via NFC VAS to a dPOINT card or PONTA card in Wallet. The #3 and #4 difference is the benefit of using Suica SF and the JR East Suica float in action bypassing the credit card companies. This last difference is the same force driving endless QR Code payment app campaigns, QR players bypass credit card network margins and pass the benefits to customers.
There is one pattern the Crecolle staff did not test: Apple Pay BIC CAMERA QUICPay and showing the BIC CAMERA App barcode point card, this gives the same 8% but without showing any plastic.
As more companies transition work style away from daily commuting to a central office to telework with direct business trips from home, there is less need for commuter passes but that means more corporate virtual paperwork and paper trails for filing and processing transit expenses. How nice it would be if Mobile Suica had a plug-in for SF expense reporting. It does actually: SmartGo Staple a co-venture between JR East and NTT Communications.
The service is straightforward: for a ¥1,000 (w/VISA card option) or ¥600 (w/o) per Mobile ID monthly service fee, SmartGo Staple provides live Mobile Suica ID SF transaction data of registered accounts to corporate management and accounting, who then calculate and reimburse employee on the go, or teleworking at home for corporate related Mobile Suica use, reducing the paperwork at all levels. The flexibility of Mobile Suica and Suica App which discretely attaches a credit card to a Suica card, allows users to set up a Suica card just for corporate use with a corporate credit card attached.
This is the idea behind the SmartGo Staple prepaid VISA card option which management can ‘recharge’ remotely. SmartGo Staple a service for the COVID era but the interesting thing is that with more people doing without commuter passes, Apple Pay Suica and Mobile Suica easily covers nationwide transit and payment use. Commuter passes are the only reason for all those Japanese Transit IC cards. One Mobile Suica does it all. There are still weak spots, i.e. non SF Suica ID # attached services like smartEX and Shinkansen eTickets. Using a transit card ID number to attach separate services is flexible but involves the extra step of corralling the separate transaction histories into one expense report.
Young employees tell the department manager to get with the times
UPDATE 2021-09-22 Along the same lines a similar but important co-venture service was announced by JR East and SAP: Suica transaction record integration for SAP Concur Expense systems. The SAP promo video shows it in action. The matchup of SAP and Mobile Suica will make Suica the default transit tool for corporate Japan.
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