The Netherlands’ national government set a target for the country’s transport companies to hit by 2025: the full implementation of a common solution for customers throughout the country to travel paying with their bankcard, credit card, or mobile phone. RET, Rotterdam’s public transport agency, joined forces with GVB, Amsterdam’s public transport company, to build cloud-based applications running on OVpay, its Microsoft Azure application. The OVpay application enables customers to use their own bankcard to pay fares directly.
Reconsidering how to transport people seamlessly
Public transportation is a social connector—an essential community resource that offers a myriad of benefits. Rotterdamse Elektrische Tram N.V. (RET), the public transport agency for the city and region of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, has been a household name in the region for almost 150 years.
RET is a socially responsible company that actively coordinates with other organizations in the region and contributes positively to the environment and society. The agency sets a high standard, with the goal of providing perfectly organized and executed public transportation of the highest quality for the passengers of today and the future. Transporting people safely and seamlessly to their destinations is just the start for RET.
The transport companies in the Netherlands integrate with each other so that passengers can travel easily on whichever local transportation system they want. For nearly 20 years, passengers have been paying their fares with an OV (openbaar vervoer or “public transportation” in Dutch) chipcard, a contactless smart card system that originated with RET and came to include all public transport on the Dutch mainland. Checking in and out of the metro, trams, buses, and ferries with the OV chipcard required a separate purchase and occasional reloading of funds onto the card.
The national government set a target for the country’s transport companies to hit by 2025: the full implementation of a common solution for customers throughout the country to be able to travel paying with their bankcard, credit card, or mobile phone rather than the OV chipcard. The program, the OVpay application, is a nationwide initiative for all Dutch transport companies. The goals for this new program were to make it easier for people to purchase their rides and provide a lower barrier of entry for new riders. In addition, a new solution not requiring a separate chipcard means lower administrative costs for the individual transit systems.
The OVpay application enables passengers to check in with a debit card, credit card, or mobile device. The first step (paying the full fare with a bankcard) was implemented in public transportation systems throughout the Netherlands in 2023. During the current transition period, travelers can pay with either a chipcard or their bank or credit card. But RET’s implementation plan had just begun.
Microsoft Azure allows for pay on the go with bankcard
To create the new cloud-based passenger payment system, RET joined forces with GVB, the Amsterdam public transport company. Together, they found that Microsoft Azure would best support the newly developed back-office applications for the OVpay application, and they hired a development partner. “We wanted to keep the familiar customer endpoint solution where passengers have used their OV chipcards,” says Hans van Veen, team manager for the RET office of the Chief Information Officer and project manager for deploying the Azure platform. “That meant we needed to change the underlying software for these scanners or gates—we had to make sure the hardware worked with both OV chipcard and the OVpay application.”
All RET workloads up to this point were within its Rotterdam datacenter, but the company decided to build a cloud-native application. “We wanted to set up the OVpay application as our first cloud-based workload and use Azure because we trust Azure security and anticipated the application software would continue to evolve,” says Martin Spijkers, RET Technical Lead for Azure Deployments.
The goal was for the new application to provide data to RET in near-real time, so it needed a constant connection. The OVpay application was built with cloud-native technology and needed to connect with systems from other organizations throughout the Netherlands, so that passengers could travel seamlessly between communities.
RET worked closely with the Microsoft Account Team Unit, Microsoft Specialist Team Unit, and the Microsoft Commerce Scale/Customer Success Unit, along with Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program member Macaw Nederland on the first implementation. “We had a few serious challenges as we began our deployment, and my prior cloud experience helped us along the way,” says Aad van Rijn, Infrastructure Architect for RET. ”The first challenge was a six-month timeline to implement the initial Azure landing zone and connect it with our on-premises architecture, so that Azure looked like a virtual RET datacenter. Then there was the question of how to deploy the OVpay application correctly on our new infrastructure. Microsoft and Macaw helped with the first challenge. Another Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program member, Eurofibercloudinfra, connected the dots for deploying the application on the Azure infrastructure in a workload environment.” Macaw’s contribution has been the infrastructure and connectivity piece; Eurofibercloudinfra hooked into what was laid down by Macaw.
The RET went live with the OVpay application in April 2023, including the Azure-based back-office applications. Azure provides a stable hosting environment where RET can easily and quickly test and roll out new deployments based on Azure DevOps pipelines. Additionally, security and monitoring are well covered and facilitated in the cloud-based setup.
“Passengers find the RET fare system easier to navigate, with the ability to use their own bankcard, credit card, or mobile phone for contactless check-in,” says van Veen. Currently a project team is working on the development of additional products such as various reductions and subscriptions for commuters, families, and groups. For some future products, a new card may be necessary.
The journey ahead with Azure
The OVpay application now enables customers to use their own bankcard to pay full fares right away without having to purchase an additional card. This simplifies travel for infrequent riders and community visitors. Passengers have been quick to adopt the OVpay application. In April 2023, there were 20,000 OVpay application check-ins per day, accounting for 100,000 kilometers daily. The number of check-ins and kilometers tripled by the end of the first year, when 42 percent of all full-fare passengers were using the OVpay application.
RET is still in the process of implementing reduced-fare programs, along with monthly and yearly special fares. The agency anticipates these will lead to even greater public transit usage that will help reduce traffic congestion and air pollution-causing emissions as well as a larger return on investment. In the coming months, RET will be shutting down OV chipcard vending machines, reducing infrastructure overhead.
“We had to deliver the OVpay application on Azure quickly,” says van Veen, “And the platform itself offers a very big advantage for our future initiatives. New analytics in near-real time are giving us insights into passenger behavior at an unprecedented scale. Because we have Azure, it’s easier to create new applications and business solutions. That’s a big plus.”
This article first appeared on Microsoft’s website: Rotterdam transport agency modernizes passenger payments with Microsoft Azure
