OVPay: the new way to travel

OVPay is the new way travellers in the Netherlands pay for public transport. This system allows travellers to easily check in and out using their bank card, credit card or mobile phone, without the need for a separate OV-chip card. It uses the existing contactless payment infrastructure to enable seamless and fast transactions. With this, we make travelling easier and safer. As adesso Netherlands, we are doing our bit by co-developing, in the person of Gert Kommer, the product sales system for easy buying and linking a season ticket to your bank card.

The product sales system (PVS)

GVB, the transport company providing public transport in and around Amsterdam, is the client of the PVS. They work with various partners to offer functionality such as season tickets, day passes and buying the balance for an OV-Pas (the new OV-Chipkaart) for travellers. Simplicity from home without having to go to the well-known yellow vending machine to link it to your pass. One of the partners in this project is Technolution, a technology company that is the main contractor for the PVS.

Technolution is responsible for building the software that takes care of the administration surrounding the purchase of transport products and season tickets. This software must not only be reliable and user-friendly, but also flexible enough to integrate with the various systems of transport companies and payment providers.

Integration is the magic word

One of the biggest challenges is making the various systems work together. There is the national system where it is known which pass has which products linked, the payment providers (e.g. Molly or Buckaroo), a webshop and finally the carrier's own CRM system. This integration requires careful coordination and cooperation between different parties to ensure that the carrier can offer its product and the traveller can use it. The integration of these systems is what is being built within Technolution.

Challenges

The entire project has the following challenges:

• The Netherlands has an extensive public transport network managed by different transport companies, such as GVB, RET and Arriva. A collaboration of some of the transport operators ensures that the PVS has to be applicable in everyone's own context. Each has its own products and product types for which a platform must be present.
• From the webshop, travel history is available. This information is available in the national system. Access to this sensitive information is limited and consists of aggregating information from different sources. To make information available for the webshop, an application was built to hide the complexity of obtaining the travel history.
• Besides the transport companies, the cooperation with the various payment providers plays a crucial role when purchasing and renewing a product. A product is charged for a certain period towards the end of the period automatically renewed. Good communication with the payment provider about the state of a transaction is crucial for a product to be available to the traveller. To this end, the payment provider actively communicates the status of a transaction or, if nothing is reported, the PVS will query whether the payment was successful.
• Linking the purchased product with the national system to the traveller's pass and possibly transferring that to another pass. The successful execution of buying and linking is achieved by not doing everything at once. By carrying out the actions required step by step, it is clear when a step goes wrong and the process gets stuck there. This makes it clear to the carrier where a potential problem is present.
• Following on from the previous point, it is crucial for the carrier that a customer service representative has sufficient resources to help a calling traveller with their queries. Which product is linked to which pass when is available because the entire PVS is an application in the Microsoft Cloud that can be easily updated through the Helm configuration allowing the various components to be easily provided with new functionality.

Conclusion

OVPay has started a movement in the way people use public transport in the Netherlands. Although the implementation of this system is complex and presents several challenges, it offers benefits to both travellers and transport operators. By creating a user-friendly experience when managing your products, Technolution, partly through the efforts of adesso developer Gert Kommer, is contributing to a better public transport system in the Netherlands.