Q&A with Sue Walnut

Product Director at Vix Technology

Sue Walnut has been Product Director at Vix Technology since June 2021. Sue leads product engineering teams and has been responsible for spearheading product solutions including mode-agnostic ticketing and cEMV payments. Vix Technology has been designing, delivering, operating and maintaining some of the world's leading transit ticketing systems for the past 35 years.

How did you get started in the industry?

I started working in public transportation the day after Princess Diana died, when I took a role at Travel West Midlands (part of National Express Group) as a Data Analyst. The core of my role was analysing passenger travel data from ticket machines and face to face surveys. My start with ticketing and data analysis was the key to my journey through National Express, leading me through 3 ITSO implementations and the introduction of several data analysis tools.

Not long after I joined TWM, they took on the operation of the brand-new Midland Metro from Birmingham to Wolverhampton. From the late 90s, I directly supported the ticketing (through PETMs!) and analysis systems at Midland Metro. Although a Light Rail system and an island from the rest of UK rail, it was a great place to learn about what is important in rail operations and about some of the systems that are necessarily different from bus systems.

In 2008, the then CEO of National Express Group took the decision to restructure the different modal operations and consolidated staff from across bus, coach and rail companies. Not long after that, I was introduced to colleagues at One rail (later NXEA and now incorporated into the Greater Anglia franchise) to discuss my experience of analytics and big data packages. Although there had been a healthy exchange of people between TWM and Central Trains over the years, this was my first taste of heavy rail. Not long after that, I was nominated to support National Express’ rail interests as UK rail began to embrace ITSO itself. It was here that I met colleagues from across a variety of train operating companies (TOCs) and the Rail Delivery Group (RDG) and got a really good grounding in the UK rail industry.

How did you start at Vix Technology?

I joined Vix Technology in November 2020 after 23 years with National Express Group, and like many I was a pandemic job-switcher!

I started as a Solution Manager, designing and specifying solutions for customers both as they arose and in response to tenders. It was a wonderful experience – I got to work with our awesome teams across Europe and North America and learn so much about our product sets, particularly our mode-agnostic Pulse Account Based Ticketing solution and our Whisper service for cEMV payments. And it was great learning from the Transit Authorities in completely different markets what was normal and expected.

What is your role within Vix Technology?

I am Product Director, UKI/ITS here at Vix Technology, a role I assumed within a year of my start at Vix.

It’s a wide brief! On the one hand, I am accountable for a number of engineering teams both here and in Europe who create and maintain our Rail Central Booking Engine (TIS), user facing Automatic Fare Collection, and Real Time Information platforms. On the other, I am responsible for the direction of those products not just in the UK, but in our markets across the world, and for understanding our customers and the markets and what the future may bring. And I look beyond what the market says it wants now, to what it might not even know it wants yet. I also work closely with my Vix colleagues in Australia to ensure the products we are developing here in the UK fit and form a coherent product offering with Pulse, our automated fare collection platform and Assure, our range of validation and fare collection devices.

How has technology developed since you started in the industry?

If I say that when I first started, I took a slam-door train to an office where I had a box of all the 3.5” disks that my work was on, and the company didn’t have a website, that may indicate how long I’ve been in the industry!

When we worked through handing Midland Metro back to West Midlands Combined Authority at the end of the 20year term, the contract of course referenced physical computing hardware – PCs, floppy disks, back-up storage devices, none of which referenced the wholly integrated Citrix-based environment that had grown up around it in the meantime.

One of the great things to see is how rail has been coming out of itself to share with the rest of the transport industry. We’ve seen the introduction of closed-loop contactless cards, like ITSO, mobile and then paper barcodes, and now cEMV, with true Account Based Ticketing just there on the horizon.

But of course one thing that hasn’t evolved is the Orange magnetic-stripe ticket. As a supplier, I think the possibilities are really exciting for UK rail, but we all need to support the Rail Delivery Group and Great British Rail (GBR) in the standards and frameworks that will keep the industry dynamic.

What do you consider to be Vix Technology’s USP (Unique Selling Point)?

At Vix, we believe the future is open and flexible. We bring to the market a suite of professional products and services, all specific to transport, that can either work together, or be plugged into your existing solution set. We work with you to solve your problem, without bringing our ego to the table.

If we look specifically at our newest rail gate product, Vix Smart Gates are the first digital-only automatic ticket gate in the UK market.

What are some major projects you’re currently working on?

Repurposing the title of an Oscar-nominated film – Everything Everywhere All at Once!

For rail, we are just about to launch our Digital Gates in a pilot with Transport for Wales. The gates include our new Cast cloud system to allow gate control and scheduling from a tablet, will accept barcode, ITSO and cEMV cards and will be up and running this spring!

We are also launching our new Assure range of hardware here in the UK. Great Western Railways will be the first Vix customer outside of Italy to have Assure, with our Rugged Platform validators going in this spring. On installation, they will accept ITSO passes, but they come Barcode and cEMV ready.

Other projects from my stables include the next phase in our overhaul of our ITS / RTI product. Over the next 18 months we are delivering a data backbone service and adding a wide variety of new features and functions for our customers operations staff.

We are also supporting one of our largest customers in migrating to our new technologies across both ticketing and AVL.

There’s certainly never a dull moment here, and I am probably most excited about the new Gates going live!

When a client comes to you with a particular problem, what’s your process for coming up with a solution, and how closely do you work with clients throughout the projects?

Great question! I love it when a client comes to us with a problem rather than a requirement, but even then I like to take it back to the Why of the problem: What is at the root of what you’re trying to achieve or solve? more revenue? more passengers? improved safety? improved retention of staff? more efficient use of resources? We then look at what the client wants to achieve now and into the future, and their constraints to help build up a picture of which products in our portfolio is right for them.

I also love it when a client comes to us with a great idea! Again, looking at what they want to achieve and why.

At Vix, we have a strong vision of our product direction and a lot of products already ready for use, but we know that none of our customers are the same as any other, so we mold our products to their individual needs through early discovery and close, iterative working throughout project delivery. Our products are highly customizable, but we also distil the deep knowledge at the actual root of the problem to recommend how the product can produce a great solution without adding unnecessary bespoke development costs.

What would you say is the most exciting technology in the industry?

From where I am, I would have to say Account Based Ticketing! To be clear, this is more than just accepting cEMV cards for post-payment, although that is an important step into the known for UK rail.

This sits alongside the digitization of rail. If we look at where other markets are going, most notably Denmark looking for Smartphone compatible ticketing systems, that is a clear indication of the inexorable rise of digital identification and tokens. I believe the future of transport ticketing is self validation by passengers. If you look at our new gate proposition, it is wholly digital, relying only on barcode or card presentation. I can see a time in the not so distant future where you will be able to use your face, finger or palm to link to an account in the cloud that will allow you to travel.

However, I want to see cEMV Pay as You Go on rail realized first.

Where do you think the industry will be in the next 10-15 years?

The other side of the orange magnetic-stripe ticket! Here in the UK the government has set out its vision underpinning GBR for the next 15 years, looking toward a German model of rail retail and operation. However, I think there’s a lot to play for. I believe the public will continue to use trains, possibly more for leisure as car ownership becomes less ‘fun’, which puts rail in a great place.

Our first challenge in the UK is to get to the other side of the start of GBR, so that everyone is clear about roles and responsibilities. The next challenge will be to ensure GBR is a recipe for innovation and faster change. Otherwise, I don’t think we’ll be much further in ten years. But by the same token, we’re already further ahead here than many places.

Typically, the first suggestion I would make to an authority would be to have a unified data service, including fares and real-time. Although in the industry we like to complain about interfacing to Lennon or Darwin, we shouldn’t forget that we are already half-way towards the future.

One of the most interesting differences I noted between bus and rail was the disjoin between vehicle and passenger. In a bus world, the passenger touchpoint is on the vehicle, whereas in rail, the passenger touches into a station with a variety of vehicles possible. As a result, rail systems have evolved a complex system of what-ifs to accommodate these possible futures. I wouldn’t be surprised to see tap-on validation moved inside trains in the next decade, which will be the start of really understanding capacity usage. Although GBR will become all of the flows and theoretically remove the need for the complex apportionment of Lennon, this granularity should support keener pricing on local versus long distance rail and drive, as it always did in bus, a focus on providing the volume and types of seats that support and encourage travel.

How can we make the rail industry a place people want to work in?

I think we underestimate how lucky we are in public transportation to have loads of people who grew up loving trains and buses and want to work in our industry! That puts us in such a fortunate position. However, we can’t abuse that, and we do need to attract and retain talent with a wide variety of experiences.

We’re also lucky that public transport is a great place by its nature for flexible working, but we have to be mindful that Working from Home isn’t something that transport professionals are always able to do. Back in 2000 when I started working from home, I was the first person in the company to do so and had to put a costed proposal to the board. If people were surprised by that, I’d often reply by noting a driver can’t Drive From Home!

In my opinion, we can, and should, emphasize every day that everything we do goes towards a greener, more sustainable world. We’ve found that this message helps