East Japan Railway (JR East) needs a good payments system to implement its growth strategy, and this is seen as one of the reasons for the rollout of QR-code-based teppay.

Suica e-money, its current payments offering, has been losing ground and might not provide enough of the right type of data for the company to plan its future.

¡°Although Suica is dominant when it comes to the transportation ticket gate, its presence in the in-store shopping scene has declined in recent years,¡± said Kazuta Fukushima, a senior research officer at Sompo Institute Plus, a Tokyo-based think tank.