MasterCard, Wirecard Offer MasterPass to Singapore Cab Riders (Jan. 7, 2016)
Commuters hailing a cab in Singapore now can use MasterPass, MasterCard’s digital wallet, to pay their fares. Singapore-based ComfortDelGro Taxis, which has the Southeast Asian country’s largest fleet of 17,000 cabs, is the first taxi service to offer the payment method in Singapore, according to the company.
To use MasterPass to pay for fares, commuters download the ComfortDelGro Taxi Booking app to their smartphones. Then they go to the MasterPass Website to enter their payment card information and register their digital wallet accounts with the ComfortDelGro app. Credit, debit and prepaid card information from any network may be added to the MasterPass wallet, according to a MasterCard spokesperson. Passengers can use the app to book a taxi and pay with MasterPass, eliminating the need to provide the driver plastic payment cards. Working behind the scenes is Wirecard Singapore Pte Ltd, a Wirecard Group company, which integrated MasterPass into ComfortDelGro’s app and processes the payments.
“By adding the MasterPass integration to the ComfortDelGro app, consumers now enjoy a seamless experience from booking taxis to making payments [and] the whole process can be conducted via smartphone,” said Jeffry Ho, managing director with Wirecard Singapore.
This latest partnership with ComfortDelGro isn’t the first collaboration between Wirecard and a Singapore cab service. Premier Taxis Pte Ltd last June announced it was working with Wirecard to provide a payments infrastructure for more than 2,000 of its taxis in Singapore.
Other taxi companies have been turning to m-wallets to make paying fares easier for passengers. For example, U.K.-based Hailo announced late last year all of London’s 22,500 black cabs began accepting mobile payments using its payment gateway, HailoPay, enabling passengers to pay fares using their smartphones. The mobile payment method is being used to better compete with Uber, a service that connects riders with drivers.
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