Switch from card to mobile app, Hong Kong's Octopus urges users

Firm’s digitalisation push comes as it seeks to maintain dominance over its competition

- Magdalene Fung

HONG KONG- Hong Kong's ubiquitous Octopus payment system is encouraging users to switch from carrying only physical cards to having virtual wallets on their smartphones.

The company's digitalisation push comes as it seeks to maintain its dominance amid intensifying competition in the city's payment systems market.

The Octopus card is an essential part of daily life in Hong Kong. Millions of residents use the contactless stored-value smart card to pay for virtually everything, from train rides to utility bills.

It also doubles as an access control card into schools, offices and residential buildings.

Its system boasts a turnover of HK$300 million (S$51.6 million) from 15 million transactions a day.

While Octopus has proven successful in the city since its launch in 1997, its chief operations officer Sammy Kam told The Straits Times that the company's biggest present-day challenge was to nudge users into shifting their Octopus usage behaviour.

"We want to migrate our users from the traditional card-based system to the upgraded mobile-based one... so that we can make it fast, easy and convenient for our users to do everything from topping up their cards to deducting payment online through their mobile phones," Mr Kam said.

Octopus chief executive Tim Ying told local media in October 2023 that the company aimed to bring its e-system to "every phone in every pocket" in Hong Kong.

More than one in five Octopus transactions are now generated by users of the mobile-based system, the company said in response to queries by ST, adding that it aims to have a majority of its users migrate to its mobile-based system for greater convenience in the near future.

Virtual Octopus cards became available on smartphones in Hong Kong around 2017, beginning with Samsung phones, then Apple iPhones and Huawei devices in 2020.