Manila MRT3 EMV and QR Acceptance - I have questions

Ingo Noka
AFCS

The secretary of the DOTR said on radio that on July 25, 2025, MRT-3 will start piloting the use of QR code wallets, credit cards and debit cards at one automated gate in each of the MRT-3 stations.

Previously, on May 30, 2025, the government already announced that Gcash, as well as Debit and Credit cards, will be accepted for payment of train fares.

It seems that kentkart provided and installed the solution. They probably didn’t start in June, but even if they already started last year, the speed of getting to a working pilot is impressive.

As the use of e-wallets is truly fascinating for me, I would love to know more about the user experience. Unfortunately, I don’t live in Manila anymore and can’t check it out myself. If anybody has the time to try out a few transaction with both payment cards and GCash, maybe they can comment here and let us all know how it went.

As the saying goes, those who believe that something cannot be done should get out of the way of those doing it.

Nevertheless, fancying myself to be an old "engineer", I cannot help myself but think of reasons why such an implementation would be difficult.

I therefore have a few questions:

  1. Have the bank issuers of debit cards agreed for their cards to be accepted offline, or have they found a solution to get an online authorization every time the debit card is tapped on entry and exit?

  2. Since Debit cards usually require a PIN for every transaction, is there going to be an exception for debit card transactions in transport ticketing?

  3. How will the train operator and the banks allocate liability for fraudulent transactions?

  4. Will the train operator pay transaction fees to the acquirer? Who is the acquirer anyway?

  5. Is the QR acceptance based on pre-paid tickets or will it work directly with the payment functionality of the e-Wallet application? If the latter, how did they solve the problems I outlined in my previous post?

  6. I remember that any change of the gate’s configuration was met with a lot of scrutiny. One of the choke blocks for any change used to be the requirement to process 30 entries or exits per minute. Will the new gates meet that requirement?

  7. EMV certified card readers with integrated QR scanners, new backend components, integration and operational cost for such an implementation will be substantial. Will this be considered a cost of doing business or is that an investment that needs to be recovered eventually? In other words, who paid for all this and why?

  8. In some other countries, account based ticketing with bank cards started with just one of the schemes (MasterCard or Visa). Will this be the case here as well?

Of course, there will be plenty of further details that will never be known publicly. For instance, how is the account based ticketing integrated with the existing system? There are plenty of reports, as well as monitoring and control functions which require visibility of and access to all ticketing transactions.

Finally, there is the question of what the future will bring. Is this an indication of the introduction of a new AFCS provider? Does this now mean that each train line in Manila is free to migrate to their own ticketing systems and providers? Is this possibly even the beginning of the end of interoperability between train lines?

Image Reference

Kentkart. (2024). One Gate, Multiple Ways to Pay. Kentkart. https://www.kentkart.com/one-gate-multiple-ways-to-pay/

References