ORCA Tap to Pay is Here!

Exciting news for Puget Sound transit riders! You can now pay for your trip using your credit or debit card with ORCA's new Tap to Pay feature. Host Monica Spain sits down with Chris McKnight, Director of Regional ORCA Operations, to discuss everything you need to know about this game-changing payment option.
   
On this episode:

• How ORCA Tap to Pay works with credit cards, debit cards, phones, and smartwatches
• When to use Tap to Pay vs. traditional ORCA cards
• Setting up contactless payments on Android, Apple Pay, and Samsung Pay
• Transfer credits and fare savings explained
• What visitors and infrequent riders need to know
• Future developments for ORCA payment systems

Visit myORCA.com to learn more about Tap to Pay

Watch the video version of That Transit Show on YouTube.

Creators and Guests

MS

Host

Monica Spain

HY

Producer

Henry Yarsinske, Jr.

Producer

Laurel McJannet

Digital Content Strategist at Community Transit

What is That Transit Show?

That Transit Show is produced by Community Transit in Everett, WA. It highlights the people, services, and stories behind public transportation in Snohomish County, Washington.

- Get on Community Transit bus, head down to Lynnwood, get on the Link light rail. So you'll be able to now tap your plastic credit card, or the credit card that you have in your phone wallet right on the ORCA card reader and get right on transit.

- Welcome to That Transit Show, I'm Monica Spain. Today on the show we're going to be talking about a new feature that's come to the Puget Sound region called Tap to Pay, that lets you pay for your transit trip with your credit card or debit card. We're going to be talking with Chris McKnight, he's the director of the Regional ORCA Operations team about how it works and what it means for your next ride. Welcome aboard. Chris McKnight, welcome to That Transit Show.

- Thank you, good to be here.

- Yeah, it's great to have you here. I'm excited to talk to you about this new feature with ORCA. You want to tell us what it's called and kind of walk us through what it is?

- Yeah, we're really excited about it too. It's Tap to Pay, and that's with your credit card, so you'll be able to now tap your plastic credit card or the credit card that you have in your phone wallet right on the ORCA card reader and get right on transit.

- Okay, can I use my watch too? Is that a possibility?

- You can use your watch if you have your credit card connected to it through your phone, yeah.

- Okay, so this is pretty exciting. I think people have been waiting for this for a while. So let's get to that in a minute. First, for people who don't know what ORCA is, why don't you tell us a little bit about ORCA?

- So ORCA is the fare payment system that is used across the Puget Sound by seven different transit agencies. And basically what it means is you can use the same ORCA card to pay for transit anywhere you go, and then you can also transfer and get transfer credits as well. So it just kind of ties the whole transit system together for everybody.

- Okay, so with the new feature using a credit card, what about my ORCA card? How does that work? When do I use an ORCA card? Can I still use my ORCA card?

- Yeah, great question. So if you already have an ORCA card, you're doing the right thing. You know, you just kind of keep that and keep using it, especially if you got it from your employer or your school or something like that. A lot of times they're going to be providing you the transit benefits as well. But if you have your own and you're comfortable with loading it, maybe you have an auto load set up or you're adding a monthly pass to that, that's going to continue to be the best way to use transit and save money.

- Okay, when you say save money, why is that? Why is ORCA the better option there?

- Because it does have the passes on it. So if you're a frequent rider, and let's say you're going from Snohomish County to Seattle every day for work, once you hit a certain number of trips with that pass, you don't pay anymore, right? You're just paying that fixed monthly. Versus with Tap to Pay, it's just going to charge you a la carte per trip every time. And so if you travel a lot, it's probably better to have an ORCA card versus using Tap to Pay.

- Okay, so you're going to save on the transfers it sounds like?

- Well, the transfers are included in the credit card payments as well.

- Okay, okay.

- So for example, if you tap your credit card, you get on Community Transit bus, head down to Lynnwood, get on the Link light rail, the credit card, when you tap it again on the Link light rail will give you that transfer credit the same way as ORCA does.

- Okay.

- It's just that as you add more and more trips, it doesn't cap out the way it would if you had a pass.

- What do riders need to do to get ready to use, if they need to use a credit card? I've done this before where I've left my ORCA card at home, so it's really handy to be able to use a credit card, but what do I need to do to get ready to use that?

- Yeah, I think the 101 readiness is having a bank card, you know, a credit or a debit card that you can use. Again, that can be a plastic card that you have in your wallet, or it can be one that's loaded onto your phone. There's a couple little things to think about that are a little bit different now that we're accepting different types of cards.

- Okay.

- A lot of people, I don't know if you've seen at the stations, they'll go by and just kind of hit their whole wallet on the card reader or-

- Yeah.

- We've even seen people kind of like bump their backpack and somewhere in there their ORCA card reads. Better not to do that anymore, right?

- Okay.

- You really need to think, "Okay, I want to get the card I want to use out and I want to tap that individually," because the card readers are smart, but they're not that smart.

- They don't want to be charged on every card in your wallet. Right?

- It'll just kind of pick one.

- Okay.

- Right? So for example, if you have a credit card and your ORCA card right next to each other in the wallet, the card reader is going to try and sense what cards are there, but it might pick up that credit card first, right? Versus your ORCA card. So it's really just getting that one card out, a little bit of a change in thought process and behavior. Make sure you're tapping that card that you want to use.

- Tap the card, not your wallet.

- Yep.

- Not your backpack. Not your hip.

- Yep.

- Okay, got it. So is there any sort of default setting for phones that will allow you to not have to go into your phone every time and, you know, select the card that you want to use?

- Yeah, so if you have an ORCA card loaded to your phone, and so that would be on an Android device, like a Google phone, the way that that will work is it's supposed to pick up the ORCA card first. It will know to look for the ORCA card first before it then goes and looks for credit cards. So you don't have to worry about that as much in selecting the card. If you intentionally want to use a credit card in that case, you need to open up your phone wallet, scroll to that credit card and make sure it's open on the screen and then tap. It's kind of the same way as if it was a real wallet, you'd kind of be selecting that and pointing it. But if you don't want to deal with all that, you have an ORCA card already loaded, you just go ahead and tap your phone and it should pick up the ORCA card as the default.

- Is there any chance that I might get charged accidentally if I walk by the reader, and say I've already tapped with my ORCA card, but I've got my, I don't know, I've got my purse with me. Is there any chance that it's going to also pick that up?

- Yeah, it's a good question. So there are in the cases of buses with multi-door boarding, sometimes they get crowded. Sometimes you're kind of like leaning up next to that back door where another ORCA card reader might be. And that's something yet to be thinking about and be careful of, make sure you don't have your wallet and your pocket and then kind of hit it again, 'cause then it might pick up.

- Yeah, so just kind of some changes, shifts in behavior, just thinking about that maybe till you get used to it. I want to talk about the timing. A lot of people are like, "Finally." So why now, and how did we get to this point?

- Yeah, so we prioritized open payments really to get ready for some of the big events that are coming up. Like if you think about World Cup and some of the things that people want to do with large sporting events, you know, you think of things like Seafair and things like that. But really this year we knew we had a lot of large events that we wanted to support.

- There's also a lot of like road construction, they're working I-5 all year, and then further east as well, WSDOT has projects going on, so it's kind of a good time to try transit I guess.

- Exactly, exactly. A lot of new riders come into the system, and they might not want to buy an ORCA card right away. They might just want to take that one or two trips to try it out and get familiar with the system.

- Is it geared more, is this feature Tap to Pay, is it really geared more towards visitors?

- Yeah, so the groups that will really benefit from this are infrequent riders, again, that just don't want to take the time to buy an ORCA card and manage an account. They're going infrequently and they just want to tap onto transit without really having to think about it. The other one that we already mentioned is large events. Just making it easier for people to get in and out of stations and onto their mode of transit that they want to get on. And then tourists as well, right? So they come in, they might be here for the weekend, they might be here for a week, and they don't necessarily want to have that ORCA card back in their wallet when they get home to wherever they live, right? And so that just makes it easier for them as well.

- Okay, let's talk about, you talked a little bit about Android. So there has been an Android payment capability for a while. What is the difference now between paying with your credit card in your phone versus the capability that was already there with Android?

- Yeah, so just to be really clear, when it comes to the Tap to Pay, the credit card payments, that's going to be available on Android phones, it's going to be available through Apple Pay on Apple phones, and also through other wallets like Samsung Pay, right? So that's going to be across the board, pretty much every device that anyone has out there you'll be able to have a credit card in there and use that to pay on the ORCA system. The difference between that and what's available on Android phones right now, which is actually being able to put a digital version of an ORCA card into your phone, is that it has that functionality again that you can load the ORCA passes on there, that you can do auto loads on that ORCA card. So it's really just acting like your ORCA card within the phone.

- So just as people are getting ready to use this new convenient payment method if they don't have their ORCA card or forgot their ORCA card, are there any services that Community Transit has that they're not going to be able to use this?

- Yeah, so it'll be services where you have to tap your ORCA card on that mobile validation device that the driver has, because it's not a bus or a train station, it's not that traditional ORCA card reader.

- Okay, so we're talking about Zip Shuttle or Microtransit service and then DART.

- And DART, yeah.

- Paratransit.

- Yeah, so today on those services, if you've used them, you'll get in, you can use your ORCA card, and the driver will present you with basically what looks like a little cell phone, and you do that same tap that you would for the ORCA. That device needs some security updates for us to be able to accept credit card payments on it. It's not something that's readily available out there yet, and we're working with our partners to develop a solution so customers can do that there too.

- [Monica] Okay, and for Zip Shuttle, you can already use a credit card if you book through the app.

- Oh, okay.

- And the other thing is, you can also book by phone using a credit card. So people who have been doing that will still be able to continue to do that.

- Okay, good to have a couple different options there.

- Yeah, exactly. So let's talk a little bit about the technology for people who are interested in that, and kind of the problems you were wanting to solve and the challenges with implementing this in this region. Because I think some people do feel like it's taken a little bit longer here. Maybe they've traveled in other cities like, I don't know, San Francisco, Chicago, somewhere else where they've experienced this. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

- Yeah, so one of the overarching things, and really one of the core functions that my team does, is brings together and organizes these seven transit agencies. They all have their own fare prices, they all have their own fare policies, they all have many different modes of transportation and different requirements for us to help them get the fare payments to them so that they can pay for their transit systems, right? So I think when you think of ORCA, there's just that extra layer of coordination that we need to do to make sure that it's providing that core value proposition that we talked about earlier, which is like, you can use this thing to go anywhere around the Puget Sound, right? The other core value that's there, is that transferability between agencies. So all these agencies agreed to give each other transfer credits so that you can basically transfer and not have to pay every single time for every trip as you go through.

- So like if you're traveling from Snohomish County and you want to get onto Light Rail or go to Sea-Tac or something like that.

- Yeah, so that's a feature that is not available in a lot of these other cities that have these other payment methods. And behind the curtain there, there's just like a lot of extra systems and math that go into that, that we have to make sure is absolutely right for customers so it's a great experience. So kind of behind the scenes there's a little bit more complexity on our end, and that's really where I- Sometimes it takes a little longer for us to roll it out, but our goal is to make sure that customers have an absolutely excellent experience, and that we're protecting that core value of the ORCA system.

- Yeah, it must be pretty exciting for you to see this come to fruition then at this point.

- Absolutely.

- Yeah.

- It's always great.

- You know, you're talking about all these agencies in the Puget Sound region, Community Transit is one of them. Of course there's Sound Transit, Metro, Everett Transit. So that's a lot of ORCA readers that are out there where you tap. What did you have to do to get ready for this launch?

- Yeah, it's a great question. There's over 4,000 ORCA card readers out there in the Puget Sound. And if you think about it, those things are almost like the things you use to pay at a restaurant on a credit card terminal. And there's 4,000 of 'em out there in the region, right? Basically, you know, payment terminals that are automated.

- Yeah, on buses at stations.

- Yep, ferry docs all across the board. Right?

- Okay.

- And one of the critical things, not just with the ORCA card, this has always been for us a huge safety and privacy protection issue for customers, but now when you add credit card and financial information to that mix, one of the huge parts of this project has been making sure that we keep customers and their information safe. There's a lot of talk about safety on transit, and that's a key thing that we do at ORCA to keep customers safe.

- Okay, so just making sure that your pri- Your personal credit card, it's not going to be shared, it's not going to be open for somebody to see. There's a lot of work that went into planning that.

- Absolutely.

- Does this help with fare enforcement? Is that one of the reasons to implement something like this?

- So we work hand-in-hand with agencies on that issue. Our goal is to always maximize the fare collection that we can do, 'cause agencies take that money and reinvest it in better service, right? So that's, you know, a core tenet of what we're trying to support. Agencies set fare policy, and then they set their fare inspection and enforcement policies as well. But where we play that role is reducing all the barriers that we can to that, making it as simple and easy as possible, not just with the payment methods, but also making sure that there's affordable options for customers that need it.

- Can you maybe talk about some of those, what are those?

- Yeah, so we as a region are a leader in the number of reduced fare programs that we have for customers for different purposes to support them, right? So one of the biggest things that we're leading in is reduced fare programs. So there's both programs where customers don't pay anything based on their eligibility. There's programs where customers pay a reduced fare based on their income levels. And I think at Community Transit that's a dollar. And then we have other programs for seniors, which is one of our most popular programs that always gets the highest satisfaction score. And then we have the RRFP program, which is a state program for disabled customers.

- Okay, are those available with this new Tap to Pay system?

- So with Tap to Pay, it's really going to start out with adult fares, and that was the easiest way to roll out this system for most people that will be using it. There's quite a few business and policy requirements as well as some state laws that drive how we can implement and deliver reduced fare programs. So that's going to continue to be through the ORCA card.

- So hang onto your ORCA card.

- Exactly.

- Or your ORCA lift, whatever your senior pass, yeah.

- Yeah, and if you do want to get one, the place to go is the Ride Store, right? You can go down and apply, or you can apply online for one of those, but just know that you're going to be looking for that ORCA card, 'cause it'll allow you to get access to those programs.

- So we're talking about fare enforcement, there are fare inspectors out there, fare ambassadors. How will they check to make sure that you've paid, you know, if they ask you for your- They used to ask for your ORCA card, right? They'll still ask for that if you paid with ORCA. But if you didn't pay with ORCA, how will they know that you paid?

- Yeah, so the way that that's going to work is that you need to provide them with the last four digits of the credit card you used. That's something that you can either share with them verbally, or you can cover the other numbers on your card and just kind of show it to 'em real quick. And then that's the same way that you would verify a credit card over the phone or, you know, do other things that are already out there today. It's a pretty standard way to know that someone paid for a credit card.

- Yeah, when you think about this new capability, what do you think about, like what kinds of scenarios are you envisioning that you're just really excited about for people?

- So I've done some ambassadorships where I go out and, you know, on the busy days, maybe there's a playoff game or a big concert happening. And I've always felt for the people that, you know, are infrequent riders and they're just queuing up at that vending machine 'cause they want to get a paper ticket or they want to get their ORCA card. They want to do the right thing and pay for transit, but it takes so long to wait in that line and then you got to get on transit. I'm just so excited about taking that barrier away and just making it so much of a better experience, especially when it's someone's first time, right? I want to have that first experience and touchpoint with transit be amazing, right? And I think this will really contribute to that.

- Yeah, 'cause then they'll ride again.

- Yeah.

- And that's what we want. What can we look forward to? What's coming in the future?

- So we are in a period of time right now for ORCA where we're finishing two big areas of capabilities. And this is a little bit of a technical way of thinking about a payment system, but the first area is, how do you fund accounts? How do you put money on your card? What products do you put on there? And who can do that for you? The second area is around Tap to Pay. It's your payment method, whether that's your plastic ORCA card, whether that ORCA card is going in your phone wallet, or whether you're using a credit card. And so we understand and are really aware of those different platforms that customers need and want in those areas. And we're actively targeting projects around those, so that we can bring that to everybody.

- Okay, no timeframe on that though.

- No timeframe, but I can promise that when it comes out it's going to be a great experience.

- Okay. Chris, it's been great hearing about Tap to Pay. I had one other thought though before we go. I don't have my credit card with me, but let's talk about on that card what to look for to make sure that you can tap to pay. Because it's a contactless system. I'm not sure that everyone knows what that means. What will I look for on my card to make sure that it's one that I can use?

- Yeah, it's a really good point. And credit card companies and credit card issuers have been rapidly updating this over time. So as they issue you that new card or as you get a replacement card for an old one, you're going to see, it's a little hard to describe this verbally.

- Yeah.

- But there's like a little bit of like, almost like a symbol of...

- Is it like almost looks like parentheses?

- Yeah, it's kind of like that. It's like a signal kind of.

- Okay.

- And that'll indicate that inside your card there's a chip that our card reads.

- [Monica] It's usually like on the back of your card?

- I've seen it in a couple different places.

- [Monica] Okay.

- Just as a rule of thumb for customers though, like if you've taken that card out in the past and tapped on that screen at the grocery store rather than inserting the chip, then you know you have it. So a lot of customers will already just be kind of like tapping that card down on the screen and the screen's doing the same thing that the ORCA card reader will.

- Very cool, okay, well, I'm going to try it later today. Really appreciate you being on That Transit Show, Chris, thanks for being here.

- Yeah, thanks for having me, it was a pleasure.