When Visa, Chase, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), and other industry leaders co-launched a contactless payments pilot seven months ago, they started small, and with modest goals. This “public pilot” made contactless payments available on a few train lines, and only at 16 stations, including Grand Central Station and Union Station.
A bit of caution was well warranted, as Visa’s Global Head of Contactless Payments Dan Sanford told Karen Webster in a recent discussion, given the massive size of the New York public transit system. Visa, he noted, has been working with public transit systems all over the globe for the last decade, in some of the world’s biggest cities — and its project with the MTA has dwarfed them all. In addition to being one of the world’s top-10 tourist attractions, Grand Central Terminal is the third-busiest train station in North America.
Yesterday (Dec. 11), that public pilot officially came to an end, as Penn Station was added to the New York list of MTA stations that enables open payments using network-branded contactless cards. Penn Station, situated in the heart of Manhattan, is the busiest train station in the Western Hemisphere, with roughly 600,000 passengers passing through every workday.