For the past several years, Cubic has been guided by a vision known as NextCity. This vision brought together Cubic’s solutions, products and expertise from across fare collection, congestion management, road user charging, analytics and more in a single vision for the future of transportation. When I became president of CTS in early 2020, I did so with a great appreciation for NextCity and for the company’s accomplishments under its banner.
Cubic’s most noteworthy accomplishments since the launch of NextCity saw the deployment of transportation solutions in iconic cities like New York, Sydney, London and Chicago. Looking towards the future of NextCity and CTS, I believe that the industry’s most innovative transit solutions shouldn’t be reserved for the world’s largest cities. The features that make it easy to get from Point A to Point B—contactless payments, real-time passenger information, journey planning, cloud-based accounts—should be accessible to all customers, regardless of size, shape or location.
With that in mind, I’m excited to announce the launch of Umo, a digital transportation platform offering that brings the exciting benefits of our existing transportation solutions to cities and agencies of all sizes throughout the world.
Premier services on a digital platform
Umo provides a common cloud-based MaaS platform featuring fare collection, real-time passenger information systems, next-generation mobile solutions, and digital loyalty and advertising tools. For cities that don’t have the resources or need for a system on the scale of New York’s MTA or Transport for London, this platform dramatically simplifies deployment and decreases implementation risks. Umo is designed for rapid implementation with no additional resources required by the customer.
We’re delighted that 31 transit agencies around the world have already committed to joining Umo, many of which will have phased rollouts over the coming months.
Long-term strategies, creativity and tenacity
Our ability to design and build a market-ready solution like Umo is the result of several key acquisitions, partnerships and strategies. Our acquisition of Delerrok in early 2020 provided us with the foundation for Umo Pass, our cloud-based fare collection-as-a-service tool. While Delerrok’s TouchPass platform was originally designed as a small, municipality-focused solution, our team has been able to enhance it with existing Cubic technologies, including predictive insights and analytics from NextBus and our Cubic Data Management and Analysis Platform, to create a small- to mid-sized solution for a global customer base. Additionally, our agreement with Moovit, which grew throughout 2020 into a thriving partnership, provided us with the foundation for our Umo App.
When we began developing Umo, we had no idea that it would take place during a global pandemic that has fundamentally changed the ways we work and communicate. I am incredibly proud of the Umo App team which built this product entirely remotely due to COVID-19. As an engineer myself, I understand the challenges and complications of building, testing and refining a product through email, Zoom and Slack. I can’t begin to express my gratitude for your resilience, creativity and good spirit throughout this process.
Congratulations to everyone involved on the Umo team. We’re inspired by your work, and we look forward to Umo becoming a household name for travelers across the globe.
For those who might be interested in hearing more about how a platform-based approach like Umo can improve mobility in cities of all sizes, I invite you to join the Eno Foundation Webinar: Introducing Platform Based Platform Based Approaches to Public Transit on January 28 from 2.00 – 3.00 p.m. eastern time.
