Minister for Transport and Infrastructure Andrew Constance announced the expansion of the contactless payment system to the Inner West Light Rail and all Sydney Ferry services, following a successful trial on the Manly ferry that has been running with Mastercard since June 2017."In NSW we know transport is no longer just about infrastructure but also about embracing technology to provide the best services possible for our customers," Constance said.The contactless transport payment trial with Mastercard, Visa and American Express will continue to run through 2018 while Transport for NSW said it was also working with eftpos to consider how it could also be included in the trial.Richard Wormald, Mastercard's division president for Australasia, was keen to emphasise the role his company played in the further expansion of the contactless transport payment trial.Wormald said that, for efficiency, larger payment schemes - Mastercard, Visa, American Express, and now eftpos - should be involved as they bring economies of scale to bear onto the system."In closed loop systems like Opal (in Sydney) and Myki (in Melbourne), revenue collection is inefficient," he said. "Expanding to into a larger payments system (like MasterCard) lowers the average cost of running the system." Wormald suggested the economics was one reason Mastercard came forward a couple of years ago to begin discussions with Transport for NSW in the first place. He also noted that the initial trial was MasterCard only, as a result of the company setting up a dedicated team five years ago to focus on transit."We have done transit payments systems in more than 100 cities around the world," he said, adding that the high acceptance in Australia of contactless cards made the concept easier to sell to the NSW Government.Nevertheless, as Wormald explained, there have been some steps taken that he wants noted to ensure his firm gets recognition: "MasterCard created the payment gateway behind the system that links up all the cards, overcoming a degree of complexity," he said.When travellers tap a payment card, authorisation is not instant and as about 30 passengers per minute need to go through turnstiles, the payment needs to be taken on trust. This is "first ride risk", something Mastercard was willing to take on.Over the past few months, other schemes have been trying to catch up, building their own systems. And it's here that Wormald seeks differentiation"Eftpos runs on a different technology (to Mastercard, Visa and Amex), so every terminal has to be updated for eftpos," he said. "This was the reason why eftpos isn't on the ferries.""It would take a large capital investment to replace the readers in every ferry terminal and every other transport system across Sydney.Wormald asserted that MasterCard is one-tenth the cost of eftpos for low value transactions. "There are misleading comments in the interchange rate space worth publicising," he said, reeling off a number of cheap deals, and implying that the NSW government would not get any cheaper deals from any other players. The way eftpos describe the situation, they have "been in