01.11.16
TfL board asked to approve £380m contract for credit card payments
Transport for London (TfL) will approve the successful bidder for a £380m contract to process credit and debit card payments at a board meeting on 8 November.
The contract will cover ticket sales, Oyster sales, the congestion charge, retail sales through the London Transport Museum and all other in-person, online and telephone sales.
In total, the contract holder will process £60bn of revenue over the next 10 years. The current contract expires on 31 December, and the new partner will hold the contract for seven years, with the option to extend it for a further three.
The TfL board papers said the contract was longer to allow for the use of contactless payments, which were introduced on the capital’s bus services in 2012 and the rest of the network in 2014. This means that the new partner may have to invest in adapting its current retail contactless system to cope with a transit ticketing model, so the longer contract will allow it to turn a profit.
TfL will pay around £19m to its new partner, with the rest of the money coming from Interchange and card scheme fees (for Visa and MasterCard). It said this represented a 0.8% saving compared to the value of the previous contract.
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