Are You Ready to Join the Growth Game in Transportation?

Are You Ready to Join the Growth Game in Transportation?

By Tuomo Parjanen
CEO of PayiQ

There are at least two ways of looking at changing transportation: what’s shrinking and what’s emerging. These are always the two sides of disruption. Car manufacturers face a diminishing market as people opt not to own a car. Local bus companies that have enjoyed monopoly returns for years see their customers moving to bigger cities and closer to rail services. Traditional taxis are fighting for clients with the ride-sharing companies. At the same time, the ride-sharing companies, the eScooter services and the MaaS operators are growing, soon to be joined by autonomous taxis and maybe even passenger drones.

 If you’ve been around for a while and stick to what you’ve got you are likely to lose. If you embrace the new emerging ecosystems and use digital opportunities to better service your customers, you go where the growth is.

When I meet cities’ representatives they tell me that they are hiring data analysts and IT experts more often than transportation planners. In other words they are building capabilities to meet the new age of transport. Credit card companies and mobile banks are figuring out ways to be part of the public transportation ecosystem of the future. We are also seeing the birth of the first true multimodal travel chains that you can access with a mobile device. And the game PayiQ is in, smart ticketing, is growing 15% per year. Even if you start small 15% per annum means you can soon expect something substantial.

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. At PayiQ we are betting all of our chips on this.

When we partner with our ecosystem partners like Microsoft or Visa/Cybersource we are sending them business but also receiving business from them. When we work with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) 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. To expand, we don’t open offices around the world, but are agile and build relationships that lead to partnerships.

The engineers we are, we like to base our beliefs on data. Since 2017 the euro value of ticketing business that flows through The PayiQ TaaS platform has doubled every year. That’s 100% annual growth in a market that grows 15% per year. To us that proves two things: 1) our technology works and 2) it is used for the right thing: powering the growth game in transportation.

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