From left, Matatu Owners Association chairman Simon Kimutai, Nairobi
senator Mike Mbuvi Sonko and Tigania East MP Mpuri Aburi during the
launch of the cashless payment system on Tuesday. PHOTO / SALATON NJAU
Hopefully in about four weeks, our
public transport system will be making a most significant leap of faith.
It will be going cash-free.
Public transport has
remained one of the most lucrative industries in the country. This has
spawned organized cartels that control routes in underhand ways. With
the move to go cashless, these cartels are threatened, including
corruption and tax evasion.
This remains one of the
most innovative moves in the public transport sector. Almost instantly,
cartels will be reduced to administrative roles and corruption will
suffer a major blow.
To capitalise on the emerging
opportunity, different technology vendors have come out with diverse
offers. This approach could prove to be the Achilles Heel of the
transition.
There are glaring unresolved challenges
staring vendors in the face. They need to be addressed before these
vendors hurriedly jump onto the bandwagon.
CASH COW
The
usual suspects include mobile money operators, technology firms, banks
and every other organisation that wants to be the king of this immensely
productive cash cow. What challenges are we talking about?
We
haven’t learnt from the fact that mobile money is still not
interoperable. The transport cards on offer by different vendors are not
interoperable.
Some vendors are limited to operations
with certain public transport Saccos, based on their agreements. Left
unresolved, this will require customers to own more than one card.
It
is impractical to imagine that all the routes will be covered by a
single vendor. Chances are some public transport Saccos competing on the
same route will not want to share vendors. What happens then?
Commuters
will need to own different cards for different situations. It means
having to load different amounts of transport money onto different cards
to cover the different legs of a complicated trip.
INTEROPERABILITY
This
also means that if a customer has a card that is not accepted by a
certain public transport company and there is a shortage of the other,
they will be unnecessarily delayed.
Clearly, interoperability will be necessary, and the sooner it happens, the better.
What
happens when the systems fail? Even the best operators of this kind of
service, the Japanese Suica cards, London’s Oyster Card, among others,
have once in a while experienced system failures for extended periods.
It
is therefore not strange to imagine that the sensor could fail
mid-route. It could also be a network failure. The offline backup system
might also fail, and worse, the card itself could become faulty.
What
happens then? Does it mean that operators are expected to transport
customers for free or use cash as a backup system? What happens to a
customer who didn’t carry cash?
WHAT ABOUT REFUNDS?
This
reality needs to be well thought through. The truth is that the public
transport sector will never be 100 per cent cashless, no matter how hard
the government tries. It is impossible. At the end of the day, physical
currency will still come in handy.
Public transport
and law enforcement have this long-standing love-hate relationship that
often victimises customers. In the middle of a commute, a matatu driver
could break the rules and run into policemen, who in the process of
doing their job will require that customers alight.
Or
it could be a simple case of a vehicle breakdown midway into the
journey. How do these customers get refunded? What will be the mechanism
for refunding them for the remaining part of the trip. Without a
transparent instant refund system, we are in for some trouble.
These
challenges need to be resolved beforehand. Also, do not forget that the
cards can be used to track your movement, which means someone somewhere
will always know where you are.
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