Mobile card payment for transport organisations in Tyne & Wear
Tyne and Wear Metro is the UK’s busiest light rail system outside London. It carries around 37 million passengers a year and is the backbone of the area’s public transport network. The system is owned and managed by Nexus and has 60 stations with peak time trains running up to every three minutes.
DB Regio is part of the Arriva DB Bahn Group, one of the largest transport services organisations in Europe, employing some 55,900 people and delivering more than 1.5 billion passenger journeys across 15 European countries every year.
BCH Digital provided their client with a reliable, PCI-DSS compliant solution that enables train staff to take on the spot fines from travellers who have not purchased tickets for travel. Via the enforcement officer’s mobile phone, fines can be paid instantly and securely.
"The solution delivers everything we hoped as part of the development of a new Penalty Fare Process. BCH has been a flexible, engaged and hard-working partner and I would have no hesitation recommending for your organisation."
By Sharon Kelly, Customer Service & Operations Director at Tyne & Wear Metro
The Challenge: To provide a secure, PCI compliant telephony card payment solution, operational 24/7
With a global operating base, secure and timely payments are vital to Metro continuing and future success. However, inefficient payment procedures were compromising the company’s ability to accept partner subscriptions by debit and credit card securely and at any time. Existing working practices meant that card payments could only be taken during normal office hours. Consequently, there was no alternative for sales representatives working out of hours other than to accept clients’ subscription payments by cash or cheque. This, in turn, was leading to costly handling and processing difficulties. Ultimately, the company’s inflexibility meant it was losing business.
To develop and implement their own payment solution, Metro knew they faced a critical security challenge: the need to obtain compliance with PCI regulations, currently standing at over two thousand individual requirements. Time and budgetary constraints did not allow for this. The company needed a PCI compliant, fully flexible and cost-efficient payment system, which could be implemented quickly and easily, allowing their sales representatives to accept payments securely at any time of the day.
The Solution
BCH Digital is part of an elite group of Level 1 PCI-DSS approved service providers in the UK. Their extensive experience enabled them to develop an in-house solution that precisely matched the clients’ requirements. BCH enhanced their existing product, PayTel Auto, by providing sophisticated caller validation and SMS receipt facilities in order to satisfy the clients’ exacting requirements. All payments are authorised in real-time through their PSP partner, Sage Pay. Real-time web-based reports are accessible via a management portal, developed to the clients’ specifications. Integration of the payment platform and BCH’s SMS broadcast platform allows the provision of immediate text receipts. As BCH developed all software in-house and hosted all service solutions in the cloud on their own hardware infrastructure, dramatic cost savings and increased efficiency have been enjoyed by the client.
The BCH product is fully integrated within the customer-facing application and provides a fast, secure and PCI compliant card process. It reduces the time it takes to process a transaction and has extra features for added security and transactional processes