Playing Patience
For more than five years, the smart card community has been eagerly anticipating the arrival of the local authority gravy train bringing with it massive orders for smart cardbased systems - often referred to as citizens’ card schemes - to support their plans to introduce electronic means for the delivery of their statutory services. We are today still waiting for this to happen. What went wrong, why, and should we still expect those orders to come whizzing over the email (hard-copy orders are so non-e)?
The British Government decreed that, by the end of 2005, all English local authorities would be made to offer their entire range of service delivery by electronic means. Authorities were variously bullied and incentivised to do this, and a process of monitoring their outcomes was put in place.
Smart cards were implicit to this process. However, about 95per cent of the 291 authorities failed to deploy any smart cards, and did little more, in order to get their ticks in the right boxes, than to publish some fairly useless web sites and a few one-stop shops. That these latter outlets have recently been re-christened first-stop shops, is an interesting reflection on their uselessness.
Whilst some 30 authorities have played around with smart card feasibility studies and grandiose pronouncements, only about eight have actually issued so-called citizens’ cards.
In spite of Government support, and the development and availability at low cost of some official database and application systems, local authorities have been unable or unwilling to implement citizens’ card schemes. There are a number of probable reasons for this:
- There is no readily apparent business case for deploying smart cards
- Multi-application smart cards require authority departments to work together: an almost impossible scenario
- The introduction of smart cards would have a major impact on working practices, and authority employees and unions are frightened at this prospect
- Multi-application smart card systems are complex, and authorities do not have the appropriate skills or management competence to develop and operate them
- Authorities are reticent to form partnerships with the commercial sector in order to generate revenues from the introduction of such schemes.
More recently, the introduction of national free travel rights for old people has necessitated the introduction of smart concessionary travel cards, and this process has almost completely eclipsed any thought of providing cards with wider functionality in them.
Citizens’ card schemes need consumer-friendly functions that will support possession and regular use of cards. Public transport has been widely viewed as a must-have function, both to ensure that cards are carried by citizens, and to generate additional revenues to the authorities.
The concessionary travel legislation, applicable in Wales and Scotland, and expected in England from April 2008, has naturally caused a panic reaction and the pell-mell flight to singlefunction smart cards to support the requirement for accurate concessionary reclaims by bus operators.
The resultant single-function concessionary travel cards could possibly be the death certificate for citizens’ cards. As an example of unjoined-up Government thinking, this is hard to beat: the travel card doesn’t even support the majority of the population who still have to pay for travel, does not cover travel on forms of public transport other than buses, does not properly accommodate the proprietary environment in London, and will probably end up as the most expensive flash card system in the world (this honour being currently held by Scotland).
Equipping every bus in the country with expensive smart card readers, and every bus depot with a card transaction management system, supported by a national clearing system, all within a year and without any consideration of who pays, is a bit of a tall order.
Just when card technology is starting to stabilise, and contactless cards are on the ascendancy (even the banks are trying to get in on the game, some 10 years after everyone else), along comes a much better technology that, with a speed that I predict will take our breath away, will consign bits of plastic to the dustbin. The mobile telephone, equipped with Near Field Communications (NFC) ability, will almost certainly comprise that disruptive technology capable of performing, and with adequate security, all of the functions currently carried out by a wallet-full of cards. Perhaps, in but a very few years, we shall be anticipating citizens’ mobile ‘phone schemes instead of citizens’ card schemes.
So what’s likely to happen next?
In the short term, nothing. Transport cards will be occupying the brain cells and budgets of local authorities for at least the next three years. Some will claim that today’s transport card is tomorrow’s multi-application citizens’ card.
Whilst probably true technically - given a card redeployment - the ownership, branding and control issues haven’t even begun to be considered, and these have always been much greater showstoppers than any technical barrier.
Here, it is worth watching Scotland, which is at least two years ahead of England in the transport card game.
In the medium term, the banks are going further to muddy the waters by muscling in on the transport game with their contactless products, although this may actually speed things up a bit as authorities and transport operators realise the threat and try to fight off the marauders who want ownership, control and float. It might even cause the Government to declare a national epurse standard, the lack of which has put back the introduction of electronic money by at least five years.
In the longer term, perhaps the realisation that proper, consumer-friendly, citizens’ card schemes were really quite a good idea will finally sink in, but by then the mobile will have taken over (bringing new sets of ownership and branding challenges), and the suppliers that have so long hung their financial futures on the explosion of this market will have been hung out to dry instead.
