Accenture Integrated eTicketing Solution: Fare Management

As the twin pressures of urbanization and environmental sustainability grow stronger, the quest for greener and more accessible land transport intensifies and customer expectations mount.

Electronic fare collection—eTicketing—facilitates the mutually beneficial connectivity that can help public transport and mass transit providers meet these demands and thus achieve fare management for high performance. “Smart” (electronic) media deliver swifter, simpler, safer travel to passengers. And automated fare management provides operators with the 360-degree view of customer activity that enables service improvements and drives revenues.

These benefits, moreover, assume special significance in turbulent economic times when transport authorities that can strengthen their business by improving cost management and boosting customer service will be able to achieve high performance now and in the future.

But Accenture’s experience shows that the path to high performance via eTicketing is strewn with obstacles. Take the technologies that can help satisfy travelers’ escalating clamor for more speed and convenience. Near field communication cellular phones and contact-less bankcards promise to extend the distribution of information and products to customers beyond today’s physical travel points, reducing infrastructure costs (especially those related to card lifecycle management) and enabling joint marketing and other collaborative ventures with banks and telecommunications companies.

These technologies, however, are still maturing and evolving. While the operational requirements of the fare management systems that sustain eTicketing—often conditioned by unpredictable political and social issues and developments—are in a state of perpetual flux.

Related Research & Insights

• Maximizing the Potential of Road-User Charging
• Smart Card Technology in Public Transportation

The Accenture Fare Management Solution for eTicketing provides a comprehensive set of functions for multi-operator schemes and multiple service channels for customer convenience, as well as the tools and architectures to allow flexibility for future services and operations.

• Flexibility is provided through the implementation of open standards, a service-oriented open architecture and extensive use of Web services to extend the solution’s functionality. The system provides interfaces to service distributed payment channels, including third-party retailers, and ensures vendor independence.
  
  
• Customer convenience is delivered via multiple service channels, including Web portals, interactive voice response and short message service.
  
  
• Financial management functions support multiple payment means and interface with financial services providers to validate all transactions and automate the invoicing process.
  
  
• Hotlisting and fraud management functions provide the technology, tools and processes to minimize the revenue losses and operational risks due to fraud.
  
  
• An asset management function allows service providers to purchase and maintain an inventory of all acquired devices, hardware, software versions or card batches bought from external suppliers.
  
  
• A comprehensive reporting suite enables detailed analysis of all critical data, with many standard reports and a tool for ad hoc report development to accommodate specific requirements.
  
  

The Accenture Fare Management Solution for eTicketing has a proven track record. In the Netherlands, it sustains the world’s first electronic payments system to cover all modes of public transport for an entire country. Some of its components are being deployed in cities in Scandinavia. And in Canada, Accenture has a 10-year contract to design, develop and implement a seamless, smartcard fare system for public transit in the greater Toronto area, where passengers will be able to choose between loading their single electronic fare card with value at wickets, selected retail outlets, via pre-authorized payments, by telephone or the Internet.