Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 14 | Page 16

NEWS Wirecard digitises intermodal transport with Qixxit W irecard, a global innovation leader for digital financial technology, is driving the digitisation of the travel industry and enabling digital payments for the Qixxit mobility platform. Qixxit is part of Deutsche Bahn Digital Ventures GmbH and is an intermodal mobility portal. Within seconds, Qixxit compares the three main methods of transportation for trips – train, long-distance bus and plane – in a search query and combines the connections to create a correlated journey chain. Thanks to Wirecard, customers can use Apple Pay as a new payment method for in-app payments. By integrating Apple Pay, Wirecard offers all Qixxit users more flexibility in digital payments. Currently, around 500,000 people already use the Qixxit service on a regular basis. expected to grow by over 30% to a total sales volume of almost €1 billion by 2023. In this context, the online mobility services segment currently holds the largest share with more than €400 million worldwide. “We have continuously developed our travel app over the last few months and geared it to the needs of our users and their feedback. Travellers want a service that offers everything in one place: smart connections, transparent fares and tickets. Together with our new partner, Wirecard, we are proud to be one of the first eTravel providers to offer Apple Pay as a digital payment method,” said Stefan Kellner, CEO of Qixxit. The organisation and booking of trips via browser or app is becoming increasingly popular. Worldwide, the eTravel market is ////////////////// Nokia and Open Fiber bridge the digital divide in Italy O pen Fiber, the sole wholesale-only player in the Italian broadband market, selected Nokia for a fibre-to-the- home (FTTH) rollout that will bring ultra- broadband services to the small towns and rural areas of Italy. The Open Fiber network will bring optical fibre from a point of presence to the customer’s home and deliver speeds of up to 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps). In line with the founding principles of the Gigabit Society, the new fibre deployment provides Open Fiber with a future-proof network that can support next-generation fibre technologies. Nokia has been selected as the sole supplier for clusters C and D (white areas) and will deliver products, services and software needed to plan, design, deploy and support the end-to-end active network infrastructure based on GPON technologies. Nokia will also offer its professional services and customer engineering experience to fulfil solution validation and integration, installation and commissioning, on-site support, solution training and project management. While drawing up its ultra-broadband strategy in 2015, the Italian government identified four types of clusters – A, B, C and D – in the country: where each municipality was assigned to one cluster based on factors including lower or higher housing density, presence of broadband coverage and market size. 16 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com