Your SEPTA Key Can Reduce Poverty
How Payments Technology + Design Will Benefit Your City
You may have noticed that public transit payments are finally leveling up to meet modern needs.
This post will walk through what’s inside the public transit pass in Philadelphia, PA — the Septa Key — and in plain language will explore what makes it awesome.
“I Don’t Ride Public Transit” or “I Don’t Live in Philly”
You probably don’t care about the answers to these questions then :)
- What single tool can lift 500,000 people out of poverty in one city?
- How did Xerox, Mastercard and MoneyGram get into your pocket?
- How do people without bank accounts pay their bills for internet, water and electricity?
What’s a Septa Key?
It’s a plastic, reloadable transit pass. With it, you can board any subway or bus, and simply hold your wallet up to the fare reader.
You can set it up to reload your monthly fare automatically via credit card.
There’s a lot of functionality packed into this tiny, unassuming transit card. Let’s take a close-up look at what all the different pieces mean.
Anatomy of a Digital Transit Pass
Here’s a snapshot of what all the logos and pieces of the pass do, and a quick explanation of why they are there in the first place.
Here’s how all of those pieces fit together:
- Mastercard logo is licensed by MetaBank to offer the Key as a debit card (only if you want to). In SEPTA’s words: “In the future, and only if you choose, you will be able to use your SEPTA Key Card for non-travel purchases by activating and funding the MasterCard Debit feature.”
- MetaBank: Via Septa’s agreement with the FDIC-insured MetaBank, the card can function as “Instant” or “Personalized” debit card. More on that below.
- Moneygram: presumably to load up the debit card balance at Moneygram locations or fare kiosks.
- Debit card numbers: correspond to users account at Metabank. Blurred out because it’s not a good idea to share your debit number on the internet.
- CVV: anti-fraud measure for payments.
- NYCE: payments network and ATM rails. Enables withdrawals at network ATMs.
- Not pictured: contactless “proximity” chip, manufactured by Xerox. In fact, a whole lot of the network was developed and installed by Xerox.
This Thing Is a Debit Card?
Yes, if you choose to activate it. There’s two plans offered by Metabank:
- “Instant”: doesn’t require identity verification, can load up to $1000 on it, fees to transact are higher.
- “Personalized”: registered with identity verification, can use it for direct deposit, withdraw cash from ATMs, fees to transact are lower.
Nota bene: Looks like it’s pretty difficult to opt-out of marketing and reselling of your information.
How Will This Reduce Poverty?
Picture yourself in one of these scenarios:
- At an Eagles game when the stadium is totally full.
- Standing in line at the grocery store when it’s packed.
- Crossing Broad Street during rush hour.
When you look around, know that one third of those people can’t pay their bills with a bank account. They don’t have access to a reliable place to put their money.
For up to a third of our city (around 500,000 people) this will be the only access to a bank account they have. And it will happen in less then one year, and basically at no up-front cost to the end user.
I am very, very excited to see what happens.
An Instructional Designer’s $.02
Now the major hurdle for Septa is adoption — they need to illustrate how the Key will improve the lives of Philadelphians. My suggestions:
- Email campaign with a fare chart to ensure that consumers understand the debit card fee structure. The lack of transparency around fee structures got the Chicago Ventra card in hot water when it was rolled out.
- Case studies of users who have made instant or personalized debit cards a daily part of their lives.
- Release an API for developers to build credit history or loyalty programs on top of the reload feature.
How Can We Improve The Septa Key?
If you signup for my new mailing list, you’ll get a full instructional design teardown of the process.
