China's Metro System Now Accepts Payment by Phone!
Source: ChinaDaily, TechinAsia, Mashable
If you've got a newish Android model in Beijing, good news — you can most likely pay for your train and bus rides with a wave of your phone.
Starting this week, this easy way to pay the fare is available across Beijing’s network, following a limited trial that began June.
There’s one issue: iPhone users can’t join the fun, reports China Daily. That’s because Apple’s contactless payment tech (also known as NFC) is locked to just Apple Pay.
So only transit riders with Android phones can tap at the gate – so long as their phone is relatively new and therefore has an NFC chip inside.
To make it work, Beijing subway riders just need to add the digital version of the network’s travel card to their phone. Once done, they can top-up the card using an array of payment options.
The capital – which has 21 million residents – already sees 200,000 phone taps each day thanks to the earlier trial period, making up two percent of the network’s daily payments.
Guangzhou, a city of 14 million in southern China, made the same move for its subway in May.
Chinese consumers already lead the world in paying with their phones, both online and in-store.
511 million people use the likes of Alipay and WeChat for online payments, while 463 million use their phones to pay for things in shops and restaurants, according to fresh data this month from China’s tech ministry.
In South Korea, also considered a frontrunner in mobile payment, Android payment appears to have been available for the past couple of years for Androids (again, not the iPhone) via the T-money smart card app.
Elsewhere in the region, in cities like Singapore, implementation has lagged behind. The country offers public transport payment to a limited range of Android phones, and requires the installation of a special NFC-enabled SIM card. Meh.
New Yorkers will have to wait until at least 2021 for a similar system.
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