There's No 'Smart City' Without Smart Payment Technology

Tomas Likar, vice president of Strategy and Business Development at Hyperwallet, writes a guest post for Smart Cities Dive that expresses the importance of state-of-the-art payment infrastructure to any manner of "smart city" technology.

What I’m proposing here is that payment systems — the solutions that enable citizens to use other infrastructure in a quick, easy, and productive manner — should be planned and implemented with the same control and attention to detail as a new rapid transit line or bus route. That's because payment infrastructure and the data that’s connected to it has the power to influence almost every aspect of civic planning.

The star witness in Likar's case is the New York MTA's MetroCard, which is now a source of major frustration, but will eventually (i.e., in 2023) be replaced with a contactless payment system. It's not enough just to gain access to buses and subways, argues Likar, a "proprietary open-loop payment system" can help improve service, cut costs, and enable access for all kinds of city services.