Since its launch at the end of 2016, Visa’s Innovation Incubator has been working on implementing cashless technologies all around Poland. After two y/ears of working on solutions revolving around e-receipts and making payment terminals available for SMEs, the Incubator has announced that they’re ready for a new mission: this time around, they want to tackle the world of city parking, and public transportation.
The idea of cashless solutions in public transport isn’t an entirely new idea for Polish cities. In some of them, such as Warsaw and Krakow, leaving your cash at home won’t stop you from buying a ticket these days – you’ll likely be able to pay via BLIK or a payment card instead. However, Visa wants to go a little bit further, and tackle the ticket-buying process via design thinking.
We strive to ensure that the solutions we have developed go beyond a system of comfortable, fully functional payments. The payment system is a base on which we can develop further facilities, (…) like matching the buyer with the optimal type of public transport ticket for their specific route and type of transport, such as a bus, or a tram. – explains Jakub Kiwior, the General Manager for Poland and Hungary at Visa Europe.
Design thinking was a method which the Innovation Incubator had previously employed while developing the e-receipt technology. By conducting a large-scale study about the perceived quality of the solution, the Incubator was able to modify the direction if the ongoing work in order to better suit the hopes and expectations of the potential end-users. Visa aims to utilize the same kind of mechanism in the Innovation Incubator’s future project, such as the upcoming public transportation project in order to make the final solutions as secure and user-friendly as possible.
Apart from the buses and trams, Visa wants to make the lives of individual drivers easier as well by taking up the problem of finding a parking spot. Who doesn’t hate arriving at a destination only to find that every single available parking spot is already occupied? We’re certainly not fans of the situation, and apparently, neither is the Innovation Incubator. The team will try and develop a solution to track the available empty parking places in real-time, through a special smartphone app.
To find out more about Visa’s Innovation Incubator, feel free to visit their website.
