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Mobility as a Service: What’s happening on the field?

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Posted on 10.06.18

Mobility insights

Mobility as a Service: What’s happening on the field?

Via ID ‘s decoding about MaaS: among 6 scenarios, let’s study the winning approach thanks to Via ID thinking tool.

To deepen the subject, you will find at the end BCG exclusive analysis for the Mobility Club.

What’s new about MaaS?

The massive adoption of mobility on demand services creates new requirements changing the way people get around in the city. Mobility as a service makes a shift of perspective from the mobility system towards the user. MaaS is a continuous process of aggregation with multiple layers of services and functionalities. It simplifies the shift between different modes of transport for a single trip offering a smooth transition from information, booking to payment. It is important to clarify the difference between MaaS and existing concepts :

Why is everybody talking about MaaS ?

For users, MaaS is a way to tackle complexity and simplify urban experience. Dense cities offer multiple modes of transportation (shared mobility, on demand, free floating and traditional transportation) . The arriving of new entrants in this sector lead to more complexity for the user whose dream is to get access to the most convenient modes with the tap of a finger.
For cities, MaaS is an opportunity to resolve existing problems. Facing pollution, congestion and finance shortcuts, cities perceive MaaS as a strategic way to optimize their functioning at a reasonable cost. MaaS platforms give the opportunity to combine existing mass-transit schemes with a growing variety of private services. Public authority should demonstrate their ability to renew the regulatory framework to keep control over transportation management and to lead to an overall optimization.
For traditional operators, MaaS is a strategic pivot. Public transportation operators are over specialized over one vertical. They were not conceived originally to become aggregators. Reglementary evolutions should let them exploiting all their potential to aggregate multiple services and change their positioning to become more user centric.
For Startups, MaaS is a new market opportunity. Startups developed two strategies to position themselves over MaaS. We can mention startups like Uber that already benefit from a high level of traction regarding its critical mass of users. Its leader position in car sharing allows the company to diversify its assets in order to offer more services and become an aggregator. Other startups like Whim start from scratch. Regarding MaaS potential and users need, they manage to convince investors to back the project.

MaaS is the new paradigm for tomorrow’s cities
Yann Marteil, Executive Chairman of Via ID

Strategic paths to MaaS

MaaS can be designed in different ways and with different types of actors as the lead. Each actor has different positioning regarding the value chain. 6 key scenarios have been identified :

Information integration
Solutions integration
Services diversification by a traditional actor
Territorial integration
On-Demand services diversification by a new entrant
The Outsider

For smartphone devices, tap here : Strategic paths to MaaS

To conclude…

We do not believe in a global winner takes all scenario. Each initiative has to be considered in a contextualized way. But we do believe in local winners takes all who ought to be well positioned regarding local constraints.

Scenarios depend on local drivers and constraints. Thus successful cases are reliant on :

a good cooperation with public authorities
an ability for public operators to change their paradigm from one vertical to services aggregation
a financing capacity for startups to back long term development