Transforming Urban Mobility with Ubirider’s Paulo Ferreira dos Santos

Episode Overview

​Paulo Ferreira dos Santos is a seasoned entrepreneur with a robust background in computer science applied to management, complemented by a master’s degree in innovation and technological entrepreneurship. His professional journey spans over two decades, during which he has demonstrated significant expertise in the software and electronic devices industries. Before founding Ubirider, Paulo held leadership roles, including serving as CEO at Kinematix, where he honed his skills in market research, innovation management, connected health, technology leadership, and e-commerce. These experiences have equipped him with a comprehensive understanding of the technological landscape and a keen insight into market dynamics.

In 2018, Paulo founded Ubirider, driven by a vision to revolutionize urban mobility. The inspiration for Ubirider stemmed from his personal experiences with the complexities of public transportation across various countries. He identified a pressing need for a more streamlined and efficient system, leading to the creation of Ubirider’s flagship product, the Pick app. This innovative platform integrates multiple modes of transportation, offering users seamless planning, payment, and real-time updates, thereby simplifying the commuting experience.

Under Paulo’s leadership, Ubirider has achieved significant milestones, including securing a $1.95 million seed funding round co-led by Tech tree Investments and Cedrus R&D III. The company has also established strategic partnerships with industry leaders such as Mastercard, Deloitte, Pay Shop, and Viva.com. These collaborations have been instrumental in deploying Ubirider’s innovative platform with contactless payments in various public transit agencies across Portuguese cities, including Lisbon, Évora, Faro, and Beja. Paulo’s commitment to enhancing urban mobility through digital solutions continues to drive Ubirider’s growth and its mission to make transportation more accessible and efficient for all. 

Episode Transcript

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: We partnered here with a company called Viva Wallet. I think it’s a great company. I love them because they are really similar. On the process that we have obsessed with the user experience, making the technology simple and following technological approaches that no one are following. So they risk a lot and they have  this system that works in 24 countries in Europe. It is amazing. So.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Hello and welcome to Pay Pod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for listening. Travel is supposed to get us where we need to go, but too often it feels like navigating a maze. Enter Ubiride, a company that’s reshaping urban mobility by making it seamless, efficient and customer friendly. Today, I’m thrilled to welcome Paulo Ferreira dos Santos, co-founder of Ubiride to discuss how they’re using technology to connect different modes of transportation and improve the travel experience. We talk about the challenges of integrating mobility systems, the role of digital payments, and what the future of urban transportation might look like. So joining me now from Portugal, Paulo Ferreira dos Santos. Can you start out by telling us, like what inspired the creation of Ubiride?

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: Yeah. So it’s a long story. I had a startup and I had a marketing manager, a Dutch guy that was living in Amsterdam. And then this idea of saying, I will never have a car. I did all the Europe with this guy to visit customers and in public transportation. So this was maybe ten, 12 years ago and his name was Vincent. Vincent shall have a better way because we moved Kilometers or 60 miles, and we need to go to a ticket office and buy another ticket. And trying to understand the networks and how to arrive to one place to another. So that idea of,  there is a big problem for the ones that don’t have a car and that wants to move around, even in Europe, that you have a nice infrastructure for public transit. So you have services, you have services. So the thing that was annoying is you have busses or trains. They are okay. The frequency is good. Why is it so difficult to access and to pay? And I was thinking that solving that problem could be really wonderful. And, and time to time, because I’m an entrepreneur, I was assessing if it was the right time because of the state of arts. So because you need to have good telecommunications infrastructure, not just things related to transport to make it simple. Possibility of paying. So most of the things that you have in transit are what is called a closed loop. So you need to buy a travel card. You need to charge the travel card. Right. So you need to interact with the vending machine or the ticket office. So you have an indirect process of traveling.

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: And then I was looking what can be done to direct the process. And except London that starts that way of paying with your credit or debit card or Apple Pay or Google Pay. But it is very heavy infrastructure, very expensive and very complex process to manage. So you can do it in big cities, but you are not serving the people that lives in the suburbs or that are moving from smaller cities or smaller towns to the city center. So there is a huge number of people that was not having the possibility of having a very seamless process of access and paying and paying. So because if you are in the city, okay, but maybe you need to touch 1 or 2 or 3 or 3 ticketing systems before you arrive at the next one. When I decide to do this, to do this, I try to understand what could be done to simplify this. And I said, I remember to have the first meeting with the team and I said, okay, I believe that the guys that will change the access and payments of transportation are not transportation. Companies are companies like Visa and Mastercard. And that is the good news. The bad news is we don’t know enough about payments. So since then we start researching and understanding what was even the best state of the art to offer contactless payments. But without the complexity of a heavy and really expensive system that spends months and sometimes years until you can deploy it. And it is what we. What inspired us to do what we do.

 Kevin Rosenquist: That’s awesome. I mean, I mentioned before the show that I used to live in Chicago, and they have a very good public transportation system. They got they really do have it pretty dialed in as a general rule. Now I’ve come out to Colorado and I’m not in Denver. I’m in a suburb. And you’re right. I mean, there’s not a whole lot of options. We have a bus system here. I don’t honestly really know how it works, and I don’t even know really what I do to get a ticket onto it or how I think some of them are free. I’m not sure how many of them are free. So yeah, I think you’re right that the suburbs and the outside of major cities kind of often get overlooked as far as that goes, even when they do have a system, a lot of people don’t use it or don’t know how to use it.

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: Yeah. So because when cities or urban areas are designing a system, they fragment the thing. So there are guys that understand about the network of the transportation. After there are guys that understand about streets after there are guys so a lot of departments and they don’t see it in a holistic way. I have a story to share with you. So yesterday we launched a new operation, a new customer that is a part of the operation with a lot of the metropolitan area of Porto here in Portugal. And so we started yesterday and there were some new lines that they had launched, and we monitor everything in real time. So it was the first day and we were monitoring and we were getting triggered because we have in one line, we were getting all the services without passengers, and we thought that maybe the passengers were inside of the bus, but we were not. Our system was not working properly. So we called them and say, what is going on? So and we found that in launch new line and they forgot to tell the potential writers. So there was no one inside of the busses because people were in the stops and say, what the hell is this bus? It’s new for us. They were not know that exists. A new bus, a new line, a new service. I don’t know how these things can happen, but it’s still happening. So they made the investment. They put everything they failed on. The most classic thing is even putting a piece of paper on the stop and say there is a new line. So something explaining to the people.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. I, uh, I wanted to talk about the platform, the pick platform. It’s pretty cool. Like it’s a, it’s a one stop shop sort of for, for transportation. How does the pick platform, maybe you describe a little bit about what it is and how it brings together the different modes of travel into kind of one seamless experience?

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: Yeah. I was coming back when we decided to start. The company is a new area called mobility as a service. That is exactly. That is a one stop shop. So an app that you can plan trips, multi-modal trips that involves all kinds of transportation. And after you can where it’s allowed, you can pay for the fares when you are on trip. You are guided with real time and contextual information to help you.

 Kevin Rosenquist: So is it basically like you say, I want I’m here, I want to get here. And it sort of maps out all the different, like, yes, modes of transportation to make that happen.

Speaker3: They give you options, they give you options and say.

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: So you can do go direct by this bus, or you can maybe pick a bus and change for a train there and then so it can provide and sell the tickets.

 Kevin Rosenquist: That is really cool. That’s huge.

Speaker3: Value.

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: So this already exists when we start. So the first company is a company in Sweden after there was another in Finland, another in UK. And when I started studying them, I found that they were struggling. And for me it was quite obvious why they were struggling, because in one hand you had an amazing piece of technology. Very modern. Very. And on the other hand, when you start looking for the infrastructure of agencies and providers and operators, they it was very old, really, really old. So most of the systems as you could not connect with them. So they even were not working with concepts like API things to make data flowing between the systems. And we saw that an opportunity is can we build some digital platform for agencies and operators in a way that they can not just be digital, but be interoperable and exchanging the data and the functionalities that are necessary to one app, talking with the infrastructure properly. And we put a challenge because one of the things that we saw is why agencies don’t change. They don’t change because they are very hardware based and very proprietary based. If you go inside of a bus, it’s incredible the number of systems that they have inside. And when you look to them with a rational mindset, you can find that maybe they were this machinery could be good, maybe ten years ago.

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: Now you can substitute them by a smartphone and it is exactly what they have done. Can we substitute all this hardware and very complex and very expensive and proprietary by something that is off the shelf, a smartphone? Yeah. Yes. It’s simple. You can buy it around the corner and it’s more they have much more technological resources and computing power than all of the missionaries. We found that, for example, a bus, they have 3 or 4 systems there, one for the operations, another all of them. They have a GPS. So and you have inside of the bus maybe 3 or 4 GPS and that old fashioned, old fashioned GPS. Slow. They work not so well. So do you have 3 or 4 components for GPS and one is being used is madness. And so it is what we have tried to do is arriving and putting just smartphones. Our first customer when we were launching, he was afraid because our competitors were calling him and saying, are you crazy? Are you going to substitute this excellent hardware by just a smartphone? And they were afraid until the moment that we launched and everything worked and everything worked. And that is the thing that we do compared with our competition.

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: So we can deploy in weeks when the others are deploying in masses, or sometimes in years with just one smartphone for the driver, they can know all the information if they are arriving on time, on stops, if they are coming out of the defined route, and when they stop, they can get the validations from the travelcards or accepts even in the same smartphone. They can accept payments with Apple Pay, Google Pay, or a credit or debit card. And this is good because it’s affordable even for small operations. So we have our smallest customer. They have just ten buses and it is okay. We are negotiating with one small operator that has just one bus, just to make a claim that we can deploy in an operation with one bus and keep any money. Not a lot, but with any money. And for them to have access to the best technology or the best state of art that exists. And with that, we have we are. So this app that is big, it’s called mobility as a service or mass. This and we are building is mobility as a service readiness. So having the infrastructure ready to interact with bikes or so to make seamless, and particularly using a payment mode so that you can use your credit card and like you go to a shopping mall and can go to different stores is the same.

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: So if using different mobility modes, like any store that you go, so you pay and you go and at the end you have all your payments multi organized in an account. So an important concept here is moving from card based ticketing to account based ticketing. So you have an account and it doesn’t matter where you travel. You have your expenses together and grouped in the same point of contact. We can measure the carbon footprint because we can know if you are doing this trip in a train, the distance that you travel, and we can calculate the carbon footprint, or if you do it by bus, that is different. And that is exactly the point. So we found that we have some difference here. And it’s not rocket science, but particularly one thing that we found when we were initially talking with the agencies, they never mentioned the word customer or client. They were passenger or rider. So nothing. So we felt it was a big distance, a big distance between the provider and the customer. The pandemic was tough for us, but help us on that because during the pandemic, most of the agencies, they finally knew what is being without customers or clients.

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: So we are really interested in creating this dialog between the providers and the passengers, because we spend a lot of time moving from one place to another. Yeah, it’s really important for our lives. Leaving the kids in the school. Going to work. Going to meetings. Going to meetings. And it’s really annoying when we face a problem and we are not informed properly. Or we don’t know who to call to know what to do when we are on a rush. And then the digital, and particularly when we start interacting not with the travel card, but with the phone that we use to get our communications with our friends, with our colleagues, with our customers. That makes the thing really, really helpful. So even if I know that there is a problem with the bus, I can fix it. But if I know in advance I can find an alternative and at least I know what to do. I don’t have the feeling that I’m lost on that. So this connection, and even in our decks commercial decks, we are always talking about optimizing the communication Nication between providers and riders because this dialog is really, really important to. To improve the quality of service. One of the.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Things that you go from busses to trains to. Bikes to taxis to scooters to write. I mean, you do like everything. How on earth are you able to, like, make these systems work together?

Speaker3: Yeah. Yeah.

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: Not all the things are at the same level of digitalization. Sure. Transit was the worst.

 Kevin Rosenquist: What is the.

Speaker3: Worst?

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: So taxis are because they are more modern now. But even if coaches are interurban, they already have good services. But everything is fragmented is the problem. So if I go to pick a coach from one city to another, sometimes my difficulty is how can I go from my home to the terminal and arriving to the other side, to the terminal, to the final destination. So these small transitions are where I believe the digital side or the digital can help to solve. But it’s complex. And the other thing is we can see this on the side by the side of the engineering. So there is technology and you can look to it. So we have done a great pattern designers. So because designers think with a different part of the brain and they are really obsessed with the user experience. So they go they interview people and after they have always a point of view or not just one, maybe 2 or 3, then we can choose what is the best balance between having something that is really useful for the users, but at the same time that is doable. That is doable in a simple way. The other thing is, and the challenge is, how can you put more things in the same app without making It’s complex. And, uh, that is we have huge fights internally because sometimes I want this. And they came against me that I’m the CEO. No, no, this will be a mess. Let’s do this. Yeah, but it’s the. If it was not difficult, there was not be an opportunity there. So it’s really difficult in fact. But what we try is to understand what are the patterns in different types of transportation. So we can use, let’s say the same technological umbrella and after tweaking just what is specific from each case.

 Kevin Rosenquist: The other thing too is not only are you trying to put all these things together, the, the, the busses, the cabs, the, the trains, but you’re also handling booking and payments. So, you know, how are you approaching integrating payments with so many different providers is because every you know, especially because you’re, you’re you’re global. So you’ve got some people that use, you know, good old fashioned credit cards, other use, others use more of a, you know, like a phone app or, you know, like just so many different ways of paying. How are you able to integrate all those?

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: You are seeing that with American eyes. So you have the same regulatory umbrella between the states. So if you pay with a credit card in Colorado or in California, it will be more or less the same. When you come to Europe, it’s even worse because I have a license. Or if I partner with an acquirer here in Portugal, it doesn’t work in Spain, so I need to partner with all of them. That was my main problem when I was with the team trying to find a solution for that. And  we were working on that in the pandemic so that almost killed us. We have not, uh, got killed because, uh, our investor at that time, just one investor, the biggest provider of transportation here in Portugal. So he’s a private company. And,  when we met them, they were using technology. They were not very modern in terms of technology, but they were aiming to become modern. So when they saw what we were doing, they said, , this is great. Maybe we can improve with you. And they become an investor. And when the pandemic came, they were struggling, but they were brave enough to say to us, you are not going to stop because we believe that what you have now, it will be even more important after the pandemic. So during the pandemic, no customers at all. And we had time to think. And that was really important to think in solutions, how to solve or how to crack that nut of building process of paying that could be scalable and not so fragmented, country by country and so on. So I wrote an email to Mastercard. So Mastercard has an urban mobility website. And I went there and I called. I wrote a cold email to them, explain what our vision was and that we could help bring payments to transportation, but we were needing their help in some parts of the technology. I was not expecting any answer from that, but the fact is that they book a meeting with 7 or 8.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Cold email to Mastercard. That’s impressive. Good for you.

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: Yeah. Yeah. And so can people from Singapore, from London, from. So I, I was so amazed that I call my investor and they said, come with me because when they will see the size of the company, they will run away. But the fact is that we in the end invent with a global, uh, sales agreement, because the point was that first, how can we make the payments without needing certified hardware or a gateway and so on. And it was coming up a thing that was being, uh, piloted by Mastercard and Visa called Tap on Phone or Soft POS. The guys from payments put the same name to different things and different names to the same thing. Uh, to also that basically transform any smartphone is a piece of software that transforms any smartphone in a, in a secure payment terminal, and that for stores or for restaurants to make easier to get a payment. So it was good but slow. So imagine paying a bill in a restaurant. It’s seconds. It’s okay. It’s nothing serious. Eight seconds in a bus is a lot, particularly if it is crowded, raining and people are pushing you to move forward. You can’t stay there. But then there and and this. It was a challenge that we put, say we would like to have this as a terminal of pain. And the first because everything on the payments that you have in transit is offline. So when you tap in London or in New York, your car, they get the data of your card, but the payment is processed at the end of the day.

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: And this tool of tap on phone works online. So people start saying to me, , it’s online. The reliability of the network will not work. It’s not good. And I said, no, I don’t believe we move from normal work to work from home. All the world population and everything works. So the networks are powerful enough and but it’s a very different approach. And one thing that it does is we partner here with a company called Vivo Wallet. That is a great company. I love them because they are really similar. On the process that we have of obsessed with the user experience, making the technology simple and following technological approaches that no one are following. So they risk a lot and they have  this system that works in 24 countries in Europe. It is amazing. So I can operate this in 24 countries without signing any other paper, find me a customer in Germany or in France, and I can start immediately. And that is is really, really good. Yeah. And now that we are having other interactions in Latin America and in other countries, we are integrating the tool of Mastercard cloud commerce, that is the terminal and arriving to, to any country. I just need an acquiring bank. I make one connection and that’s it. I’m ready. And they need smartphones. So it is simple. And then we have already set up operations in a couple of weeks. So it’s really, really fantastic.

 Kevin Rosenquist: There’s a lot of change happening obviously between electric vehicles, autonomous tech. There’s a lot of stuff happening. You know, obviously in that area. What are you excited about? What do you see coming in when it comes to urban mobility? When it comes to public transportation, what do you think the next big wave is and what are you excited to see?

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: Yeah, so I’m really bullish because the issue is lack of space. When you see that in the beginning of this century, 35% of the world population was living in urban areas. Now is 65. So 25 years. And so a lot of people moved to urban areas.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Wow. We didn’t know that. That’s an interesting statistic. I did not know that.

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: Yeah. It’s always world Bank has these statistics and they are monitoring US cities or urban areas. That has 75, 80%, 85% of the population. And that means that there is lack of space. So you can’t no more if one car per person, because you have more people in the cities and there is no mobility at all. You have congestion. So what is the point of having a car and stay stuck in the same place in a queue everywhere?

 Kevin Rosenquist: I knew when I lived in Chicago, I knew a lot of people who never had cars. When I first met my wife, she didn’t have a car. I mean, like, yeah, there was no reason. A lot of people were just like, what’s the point?

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: See the work that was done in New York? So they are reducing the space for cars. Once I went there with my family and I said, what the hell is this in Times Square? They paint the street green, the beach seats and so on because they were piloting. Now you don’t have cars there. So they reduce the space for cars. So they release space for people and transit. So you can bike, you can walk or you can take a good bus or even the metro. You see this wave here in Spain in a lot of cities they are reducing the space, doubling Paris. Uh, London. So all the cities that are facing this problem, they found that they shall do the opposite. If you have a car, you leave it outside of the city. So then you can commute with the parking and after you can commute with, with the public transit. And that is the way that you are not feeling equally in all the places. But I think it’s unavoidable. If you talk with any city council in the world, ask them what is the main difficulties or the main challenge, and they see a problem of space. You are lacking housing because if it is so hard for the people that lives in the suburbs to get in the city center back, of course they want to live in the city center or close to the city center, but after it becomes so expensive, they need to live outside.

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: So I believe that suburban trains will be a reality, at least here in Europe. Like they are doing so well in Asia. In Asia, I see the same way in Latin America, in Latin America. And I think this and that when you are cars are good because it gives you freedom. You go to reach a destination. So when you need to substitute a car by other stuff, you need to have different level of information. Very simple, very reliable in real time. That allows you to commute in a way that if there is something that happens and it happens also with the cars, there are accidents that you can find an alternative that is not under your pattern and your pattern. This will be faster in some places. It will not happen everywhere. But I think this wave of people coming to urban areas, you can revert it. So the only way is substituting things. And there are for example, I was in Buenos Aires and in the city center of Buenos Aires between 9 to 6. There are no cars, just busses. So the busses move really fast, really well, really well. They are clean, they are clean. So it’s good, it’s good.

 Kevin Rosenquist: It’s not always convenient for everybody, but for the masses it actually works really well.

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: Yeah, one of the things is cultural. You have this problem in the US, so you can’t design a transit system. If you want that it works. You can design just to the poor ones. You need to design tool. So yeah, if you design to the poor ones, you are starting cutting on investment, on investment and investment. After you have a lousy system, you have a lousy system. But it’s the same that you have in the US. Premium systems like Chicago or New York or Boston or Boston in other places is not so good. But even culturally, I think that the transit is good because we spend so much time now around. Our device is a place that you need to to deal with. Other people, on the other hand, is a matter of perception. Tell me one person that doesn’t like to travel by plane? , most all of the people likes so. And planes are collective transportation. So we go in the plane. Except some of you very rich. We have a plane for the crowds. And it’s not so bad. It’s fun when we travel with the family, good colleagues that go on the trip. So it’s not nothing bad.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Mhm. Yeah. Well hey Paolo, thanks so much for being here. This is fascinating. I love the product. And I look forward to watching uh watching where Ubiride goes.

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: Yeah. Thank you very much. It was really, really a pleasure to be here and particularly to talk about mobility in a place where people talk about the fintech side. So the financial side is really, really exciting. But what is this? This is how we are embedding it to offer a better way of people to to move.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. That’s amazing. It’s awesome stuff. All right. Well Paolo, thanks so much for being here. Really appreciate your time.

Paulo Ferreira dos Santos: Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you.