We are really excited today to announce our partnership with Semble.
At Snapper we have always believed that the smartphone will be the preferred device for personal computing. We are big fans of Benedict Evans who coined the phrase ‘Mobile is eating the world’. You can see evidence for this everywhere:
-Smartphones are outselling PC’s by more than 2:1
-Smartphones make up more than 40% of all mobile phones sold today
-They have eaten the internet, cameras, they are eating payment and we believe that public transport is next.
We made decisions very early on to align our technology with mobile technology in preparation for this, including selecting the same card type for the Snapper card that mobile network operators use for their SIMs. We knew that if we did this, we could make it very easy for our customers to take advantage of smartphones when the time was right.
And so it has proven. Almost 3 years ago to the day, we launched 2 mobile products:
1. Snapper Mobile an app that lets customers reload their Snapper card by simply touching it to any Android NFC phone.
2. In partnership with 2degrees, Touch2Pay. NZ’s first commercial mobile payments service that let 2degrees customers use their phones to pay for public transport, retail, taxis and parking, anywhere they see the Snapper sign. Again simply by touching their phone to the reader.
What we have learned in this time is that our customers love these services. When they are well designed, they are instant and convenient for reload and payment. They make the experience of public transport fundamentally better by letting customers get from A to B and getting the payment process out of their way.
Our customers also told us they wanted more. While they could use any NFC smartphone from any mobile network operator to reload a Snapper card, they told us they wanted to use their Vodafone and Spark smartphones in the same way as 2degrees customers to pay for all Snapper services just by touching their phone to any Snapper reader.
It’s a natural progression and we’re very proud to be Semble’s first transit partner in NZ. From June this year all Semble customers will be able to download a Snapper payment card into their Semble wallet and, in tandem with the Snapper Mobile app, use it throughout the Snapper network for reload and payment.
Our view is that Semble is the natural partner to work with. Semble provides distribution to the widest range of customers for secure, instant, mobile payments. Semble provides certification services that means we don’t need to worry about managing the complexity of multiple phone hardware, OS and SIM variations. This makes it easier for us and other application providers to meet our customers needs, and that is what it is all about.
We are looking forward to launching in June and are proud to support Semble as they deliver on their vision of a customer focused mobile payments platform for all of NZ.