Growing the transport ecosystem through collaboration

Multimodal mobile ticketing and mobility-as-a-service solutions appeal to modern customers and in the face of climate catastrophe, optimising the existing transportation infrastructure is vital. But real change requires much more than applications. Due to this realisation, the space of smart mobility is going through a dramatic change. Only a few years ago it was the playing field of start-ups. Now almost everybody – customers, start-ups and bigger companies – are facing the fact that it is practically impossible for one company to deliver all that is needed: payments, ticketing, navigation, readers, user interface, insurance, reliable and connectible back-end and transportation hardware. Therefore, the space is turning into a sizeable ecosystem consisting of small and major actors. 

Scaling in the new transportation economy requires a growth mindset focused on increasing the value of the ecosystem, not just that of your own shop. When we solve modern transportation needs for the customers, we must be willing to sell our partners’ and sometimes our competitors’ services. When we partner with our ecosystem partners, we are sending them business but also receiving business from them. When we work with original equipment manufacturers, we don’t look for an exclusive partnership but want our platform to connect to all of them. And when we work with transportation operators, we show them how they can grow their businesses and customer satisfaction by offering other operators’ tickets too. The same applies to cities we work with: we encourage them to build joint bundles with the private operators and to use the data from our platform to do it intelligently.

It has become increasingly clear to us that the app space is crowded and what is really needed is deep and safe integration of different members of the emerging ecosystems: transportation providers, ticketing applications, payment solutions, traffic planning and other back-end solutions to begin with. This is what we are betting on at PayiQ. We firmly believe in open ecosystems and therefore have no exclusive deals but many close partnerships. So far, the results are very encouraging. During the last year, when the development described above has really started to take place, practically all our growth has come from deals we have made together with our partners. There is very little space left for single vendors: it is not about who can build the app, but who can deliver a credible consortium. 

Tuomo Parjanen is CEO of PayiQ

This article was originally published in the Spring 2020 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issues delivered directly to your inbox.