Passenger is first mobile app ticketing platform to support Britain’s new £1 coin

This was an April Fools’ Day joke

The new £1 coin has been introduced into circulation this week. Many businesses, however, are having a hard time adapting their hardware to the new coin, and some suppliers have been spotted charging not insignificant sums to update vending and ticket machines.

After an extensive trial of the new technology, from the start of April we have enabled support for the new 12-sided coin across all mobile apps and the Passenger Cloud system. This joins our previous upgrade to support the new £5 note in September 2016.

Starting today, the new £1 coin can be used to buy mobile tickets in Passenger apps for all phones. This is supported on iPhone (along with Apple Pay) as well as Android devices.

For backwards compatibility, support for the old £1 coin will be kept until it is no longer in circulation.

Passenger COO, Matthew Morgan, had this to say:

“It took the whole team working around the clock to make sure we could deliver this groundbreaking update in record time and we’re proud as punch to say we’ve made it by the deadline.

Some people will argue that as we don’t truly take any physical cash there was no actual work. While those people are right, it cannot be understated how impressive and swift our turnaround on this work was.

By choosing to use end user mobile devices as part of their ticketing infrastructure, transport operators can avoid painful hardware upgrades every time the Royal Mint decides to invent a new coin.”

For further information, or to arrange a technical demo of how the new coin works seamlessly with our mobile app platform, please contact [email protected].