There are discussions underway with Vodafone to include MyCash on the eTransport platform, and if people have a Visa debit card or a normal access card with Visa on it, they will be able to tap on the machine and pay.
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Communications Manoa Kamikamica highlighted this to fijivillage News when asked about the eTransport woes people on the ground are facing.
Kamikamica is reassuring people that they are doing their best to make sure the e-ticketing system is nothing like the previous one, as they only launched a couple of months ago, but there are a few things that are going to come into play that will hopefully make e-ticketing a lot easier.
He says they need to put out a lot more awareness around how to replenish it, for example, with the incident that happened last week, there is an online option as well as an offline option for the agents.
The Deputy Prime Minister says potentially, some of them could have done top-ups without needing to be connected, and maybe a lot of the agents were not aware.
He says they had a meeting with the bus operators, and Vodafone where the bus operators raised concerns about accessibility, and they are looking at how many more agents they need to introduce along all the bus routes.
Kamikamica says another way that people can pay or top up is through NFC-enabled phones, so they need to make sure that in terms of the coverage of top-ups, people can get access.
He says one of the interesting things Vodafone was saying, is in the family, if someone has an NFC phone, they can quickly top up other phones.
The Deputy Prime Minister says there are a lot more innovative top-up solutions happening, and there will be a big information campaign to go out to try and inform the public, on what they are trying to do.
He says on the issue of iPhones, we do not have PayPal and some of the other things in Fiji, so you cannot work off the Apple phone for NFC but Vodafone is talking to Apple and PayPal.
