We aim to create a world where people enjoy traveling freely.
Here is the introduction of our footsteps and mission.
QUADRAC is a technology venture established by a member who developed FeliCa* the contactless IC card at Sony Corporation.
As soon as I joined Sony in 1994, I also took part in the development of FeliCa. At that time, taking public transportation or paying at the convenience stores using a card was still a dream. Over the years, I’ve witnessed a social transformation where these “fantasies” become a reality. Subsequently, the experience in communication technology and the development of cloud technology brought me to join and set up a team to develop voice interactive services that connected cloud technology and hardware. After successful launches, I left Sony and joined QUADRAC.
And now, my new challenge is to update the traveling and the payment system again.
It has been 25 years since FeliCa was released. Today, we have various transportation payment services available; nevertheless, there still isn’t a single service that allows us to travel anywhere you want. There are a variety of IC card services provided by many different transportation companies in each area. However, none of them would work between different areas. Needless to say, they don’t work overseas.
In addition to that, there are numerous types of IDs and payment services that you can use to pay at stores.
Is this ever-increasing diversity and complexity in making payments really the most efficient and comfortable solution for us? I don’t think so. This is far from consumer-friendly.
Just like how we keep money in one or two places, if we could just pick one “wallet” to make all the payments, traveling would be much less stressful. The system would be able to deduct the transportation fare from the wallet by identifying you and calculating your travel fare after you’ve made the travel. You wouldn’t need to worry about topping up the balance on your IC card or accepted services in the area. You don’t even have to think about paying transportation fare before your trips.
Whether it’s public transportation or renting a car or bicycle, wouldn’t you agree that it’s more ideal if we could just focus on traveling and pay in arrears?
We are developing a system to make the process of getting on and off transportation facilities as seamless as possible to make the use of travel services more ideal and user-friendly. We have developed a data center and Q-CORE which is a high-performance server that can process and analyze the data gathered from a vast number of card readers at high speed. With this backend environment, we provide a transportation payment service “Q-move”, which uses a credit card number or a QR code as an identification. Once this infrastructure service gains more popularity and comes into wide use, we would be able to get around on public transportation more easily and conveniently. We will be able to establish an entirely new way to travel; all we’d need to do is to just place a credit card or QR code and pay later.
Within the next few years, the mobility environment around us will likely change dramatically. Auto-driving to begin with, then various levels of shareable mobility services including trains and buses will be networked. In addition to that, ultrafast transportation services, such as linear motor trains, will start operating and allow us to travel around more easily and freely.
However, if we will still need to use various IDs and services to travel, the traveling experience will remain the same and will not be as easy and stress-free as it could be.
To truly achieve a stress-free, seamless, and more enjoyable traveling experience, it is essential to realize a society where you can travel with just one ID without thinking about methods of payment. On top of that, it would be ideal if you could be able to check into a hotel and pay at stores using the same ID. Every payment is tied to your ID and processed on the server, and you get notified about the payment later.
The dreams we had 25 years ago, when we developed the contactless IC card system, have evolved into something even bigger and wilder. Nonetheless, in the near future, they may become true.
We will keep creating innovative services to strive for the realization of a world where traveling is stress-free, seamless, and more enjoyable.
* FeliCa is a registered trademark of Sony Corporation.
* FeliCa is a contactless IC card technology system developed by Sony Corporation.
What kind of a world are we aiming to create as our mission?
We aim to realize a world where traveling is stress-free, seamless, and more enjoyable.
What is our goal and how do we act to achieve our mission?
Reduce the stress of traveling in Japanese society with a new payment technology.