Data insight for Flowbird in open payments in public transport

Paying for public transport with your payment card

Since 2023, it is possible in the Netherlands to pay for public transport with payment cards. In France, this was already an option for quite some time, since it was the first country in Europe to allow this type of payments. As a frontrunner, Flowbird (a French company that specialises in payment and ticketing systems in public transport) made this possible. To do so they use open payments, a system that allows contactless payments with any payment card. This technique builds on the idea of open banking, with banks making more and more data available to third parties.

Flowbird also wanted to give travellers insights into their travel behaviour as an extra service. Think for example of the location, time, and costs of each journey. Even though this may sound obvious, it is an innovation when it comes to open payments in public transport. These payments are regulated by very strict legislation, and businesses are only entitled to receive information that’s necessary for completing payments. This means card numbers, but not the names of the holders. So, the question we started working on with Flowbird, was: how can Flowbird link travel, payment and personal data to a traveller? And also: how does Flowbird provide insights to travellers while keeping privacy in mind?

Want to know more about the case?

Challenge

Insights into the data of open payment systems for public transport

Solution

Registration of personal and payment card details in an online portal

About Flowbird

Flowbird is a French company that helps cities around the world build mobility networks to achieve their social, environmental and economic goals. Flowbird's ambition is to create seamless urban mobility networks using cloud-based platforms that connect systems for parking, public transport and shared mobility. This makes it easier for travellers to plan and pay for travelling around the city.

Online portal with 3D secure flow

After exploratory sprints with Flowbird, we decided that the existing online portal was the answer to that question. The solution was to let travellers register their payment card via an online flow, in a personal account in the online portal. This would include a 3D secure flow to make sure the payment card really belongs to that specific traveller. Moreover, Flowbird can save a reference to the card number via the online flow, allowing the different data sources to be linked together. This unique system makes it possible to give both Flowbird and travellers the insights they need.

Multiple advantages

The travel behaviour insights offer even more advantages to Flowbird and travellers:

Public transport companies have better control over debtors because travellers' payment methods are directly linked to Flowbird systems. This means that public transport companies can make periodic reservations of 0 euro on payment cards to check whether they are still being used. If a traveller is found to have unpaid journeys, they can be paid off through the online portal.
This system works for refunds too, by claiming refunds for delays through the online portal.

Scalable data processing of public transport transactions in the AWS Cloud

Moreover, it is very important that transactions are visible and verifiable to travellers as quickly as possible. This is a challenge, since public transport transactions come in bulk during peak hours such as morning and evening rush hours, while it is less busy at other times of the day. This means that the data processing of transactions must be able to scale up and down from one moment to the next.

Through a mostly serverless AWS set-up, we enable Flowbird to deploy this globally in a real-time, cost- and time-efficient manner:

Cloud resources are used optimally, and results are in quickly. Data processing is done in AWS Lambda, working from a number of Amazon SQS queues to temporarily hold transactions. Results are then merged into managed RDS databases to perform analysis and financial reconciliation.
Strict privacy regulations are met by using AWS regions where data is kept in a specific geographical context.
Flowbird can really focus on managing public transport transactions and payments, because AWS performs extensive auditing and security functions automatically. These are normally complex tasks that take up a lot of time.

The results

10+

AWS services collaborating

10+

payment schemes accepted

15000+

bus stops and metro stations in Paris from which data is being collected

Future possibilities

Future opportunities? There are plenty for Flowbird. For instance, the company is already operating outside of France, and is looking forward to expand to even more countries. To make the system ready for cross-border activities, we made sure that different Payment Service Providers can be linked in a uniform way. Since every country has its own payment products and methods, an important part of scalability is being able to quickly link new Payment Service Providers.