Earlier in the year, Mastercard and AF Payments (the company behind Beep) teamed up with the goal of allowing EMV (Europay, Mastercard, and Visa) payments on our local transport networks. That partnership has finally borne fruit.

Seasoned travelers are probably screaming in joy and disbelief, as this scheme has long been employed in other countries’ transport schemes such as Singapore’s MRT and London’s TfL network.

Today, you can now ride BGC buses by tapping on with your contactless EMV card in lieu of a Beep card or Beep QR code. There’s no pre-registration necessary, and any fares incurred during the day will be debited from your account the following day.

This is possible thanks to the partnership between AF Payments and Mastercard, with Landbank being the acquirer or the entity responsible for processing charges and payments with EMV cards. Despite this, you can use most banks’ EMV cards—be it debit or credit—to tap on to your next BGC bus trip.

We’ve been told conflicting information as to whether Visa cards work. It should be integrated into the system in the future, but only Mastercard is guaranteed to work as of this moment.

AF Payments president and CEO JJ Moreno says that the rollout of their partnership is a way for the private sector to contribute to nation-building: “It’s very difficult to commute in the Philippines. We want to make it a little bit more bearable.”

Everyone we’ve talked to from Beep’s side mentioned that their system is primed and ready to be implemented elsewhere. Other private transport groups such as P2P bus operators can utilize EMV payments with Beep’s updated terminals. They just have to ask. “We just need to flick the switch to turn it on,” shares AF Payments COO Jojo Carpio.

On the side of the public sector, well, it’s a little bit more complicated.

AF Payments thinks that for such a scheme to work on the EDSA Carousel, a full cashless system must first be implemented. This isn’t unchartered territory, as the Carousel was originally contactless in its early years during the pandemic. Moreno reasons that having both a cash and cashless flow makes things complicated on the ground, and users would naturally default to the scheme they’re used to if not given an incentive to switch.

Implementation on the MRT Line 3 faces an uphill battle with administrative bureaucracy. The terminals exist, and Beep’s system is more or less ready to accept payments, but approval has to be sought from the powers-that-be for the new payment option to go online. AF Payments remains hopeful, though, that such a scheme would push through soon enough given the government’s push toward digitalization and better public transportation.

DOTr’s transition toward an open-loop transit scheme with its Transpo standard for automated fare collection makes such an interoperable scheme work well, too. It is interoperable from the get-go, but AF Payments is the only company that complies with the standard fully, leaving commuters to deal with multiple transport cards as they travel.

With some sense of irony, our seat on the trial BGC bus yesterday was on its literal last legs, swaying from side to side. The age on BGC’s fleet is showing, and dwindling bus availability doesn’t mix well with the ever-growing crowd of commuters waiting to get home. It’s great that we get to have more options to pay for transport, but it’s frankly useless if there’s no transport available to begin with.

Morales recalls an international transport conference he attended a few months ago, beaming with pride that they can finally announce Beep’s transition into open-loop ticketing and EMV payment acceptance.

“Finally, today we will be at par with the rest of the world,” he declares. “The Filipino deserves no less than the global standard.”