The solution: A2B taxi platform
The current situation in the market has inspired us to create the platform, specifically designed to connect customers with professional and accredited drivers directly. The customers will be able to order the services via an application on the smartphone and all requests will be sent to the driver who can pick up the customer. The payment for the driver will be completed electronically and in case of success this system will be available in up to 46 cities across Europe.
The essential feature of apps that are offering lifting service (Uber, Lyft) which is considered in a sceptic way because of its legal background. It also creates a lot of issues which limit the activities of those companies in some countries with strong and important markets. In A2B Taxi platform only the licensed drivers will be allowed to work. It will not cause any legal consequences. Furthermore, the potential of a traditional taxi industry is still not being completely fulfilled. In many European cities ordinary taxi drivers are usually still depended on old-school call centers or simply pick up customers straight from the streets. Both drivers and customers do not find this system convenient – the former cannot work in a financially stable environment and the latter are forced to search for a car in complicated ways rather than simply requesting for a car via the app. The most prominent platforms are focusing towards the pickup service only; hence, there are not many alternatives for traditional taxi drivers.
Usage of the app - taxi companies
In some cases A2B Taxi will work in partnership with existing Taxi companies, while in other cases A2B will cooperate directly with taxi drivers who are working independently. The first company that will be using the platform will be A2B Taxi in Vilnius, Lithuania. After that other partners will join the platform as well. After a successful token sale campaign and development of the software A2B Taxi will start the expansion of business from Vilnius to other European cities. Targeted cities will have 1 or 2 A2B Taxi employees/ambassadors who will work in their own market in order to attract independent taxi drivers. As for the existing taxi companies in the cities - A2B Taxi local managers will do B2B sales and offer companies to join the platform and increase the number of bookings. Please refer to “Business development and Marketing” section for more information. Drivers or taxi companies will get paid daily in A2B Taxi tokens via the app and they will be able to cash them out into Fiat currency or keep in tokens.
Requirements for drivers
All A2B Taxi drivers will be verified before entering the system and will have to pass these requirements:
• Automobile no older than 5 years (or less depending on the city rules)
• Automobile with 5 or more seats
• A license that is accepted by the city council or any other local authority
• Impeccable reputation
• No violation of road traffic regulations for the past 1 year
• Knowledge of at least one foreign language
• Driving experience (exact number of years depends on the regulations in the particular city)
During the working hours clothing requirements as well as requirements for behavior and general service culture will be imposed. A Customer Service Standard will be established for the drivers to follow. First 15,000 drivers who will join the platform and will work with the assistance of it for more than a week will also have an opportunity to receive 1000 tokens (worth around 100 USD). Please refer to the “Development and technical stats” section for more information about the app.
Payments via A2B taxi
The payments on A2B Taxi app will be completed with ordinary bank cards and currencies as well as with the cryptocurrency, released by the company during the primary stage of this project. In the beginning, the payments completed with our cryptocurrency will be encouraged via making a discount of 30% or returning the amount paid back in the cryptocurrency. In other words, the trip paid by tokens will be 30% cheaper, but there will also be a possibility to pay by card. The amount of money paid by a bank card will also be converted to tokens, but this method will cost relatively more. Therefore, it is more beneficial to pay in tokens from the very beginning. However, the method with cards will exist for a while due to customer’s own convenience. Later, when the platform becomes more and more popular, the method of bank cards will be eventually dissolved and only the cryptocurrency will be accepted, as it should (and probably will) increase the demand for it.
Customer Support
Customers experience and satisfaction is a crucial element in any business. As A2B Taxi will work only with verified taxi companies and drivers, we will be able to ensure that the service provided by them will be at a top level. If a client will experience any kind of problems during the ride - A2B Taxi will take all the complaints seriously and will work together with law enforcement agents if needed. This is why A2B Taxi will have their own customer service, available 24/7. The email and call center will receive all complaints from the users, analyze them and pass them on to the drivers. A2B Taxi also promises to listen to customers’ feedback and make decisions on partnerships accordingly. If any driver or taxi company will dissatisfy customers - A2B Taxi promises to terminate the partnerships immediately.
Technical architecture
The architecture of the system is based on the principle of microservices. The system is divided into many microservices, which are responsible only for a particular domain. The services are designed to be as lightweight as possible and independent of each other, doing their domain tasks. The microservices do not have a state, which allows you to have an unlimited quantity of one microservice instance. Depending on a number of requests, you can increase or decrease the volume of the instances to ensure proper system speed and reliability. It is planned that the micro-services will be hosted on the Microsoft Azure Service Fabric platform, which has a load balancing, monitoring, and automated instance switching and shutdown feature. All database that will be required for services will be stored on the Microsoft Azure cloud database service.
All system components, web portals, and mobile applications will not have direct access to the microservices. The system will use the API gateway which will be a single entry point for all clients. API gateway will process queries in two ways:
• It will only work as a proxy between the client and the service
• Will execute multiple requests for different domains, aggregate data, and return aggregate data to the client.
It is expected that API gateway and web portals for the organization and system administrators will be hosted on the Microsoft Azure Web App Service.
Financial information
We see the potential to operate in 46 European cities. The exact number of cities that A2B Taxi platform will be available in depends on the level of your contributions. The starting costs in every city is around 0.43 million Euros. These investments will also be used for advertising, marketing and attracting the customers/drivers.
As the most important thing is marketing, here is the breakdown of where exactly A2B Taxi will spend the money:
30% - Advertisement on Google, Facebook, etc.
30% - First free trip promo codes.
20% - Recommend to the friend promotion.
15% - Other advertisement ( billboards, magazine ads, etc.)
And ±5% will be spent on entry into the new market ( recruitment, training, business trips, office & office supplies).
During the first year, all of the profit will be reinvested on marketing in order to expand.
Considering that the plan is to release the platform in 46 cities, the overall sum is (0.43*46+3) ~ 22.7 million Euros. If this amount is not reached, the activity can be conducted in less than 46 cities.
The lowest amount for making the platform operating in 10 cities is 7 million Euros. If this amount is not received ( 7 mln. EUR ) – your contributions will be given back. If we receive more than the minimum, but less than the maximum amount – the project will be realized, but the platform will be released in a smaller number of cities.
Token
Overall, 500,000,000 tokens (each worth 0.1 USD) will be released. During the first sale (Private SALE 25, which will also be private) 10% of the tokens are planned to sell with the discount of 25%, what means that each of them will cost 0.075 USD each. The private sale will be available for people who will subscribe our page for a newsletter and will also express the enquiry to buy tokens.
Later, the first public sale (Public SALE 15) will take place and a tenth of the tokens will be sold with the discount of 15% and will cost 0.085 USD each.
Additionally, two more sales will be announced (Public SALE 10 and Public SALE 5), where we will sell the following tenths of tokens with 10% and 5% discounts respectively, as they will cost 0.09 USD or 0.095 USD each.
Roadmap
It will take around 9 months to create and to test the platform. After the official release, the platform will work only in Vilnius for the first three months (in order to find out and analyse the trend of customers’ behaviour and to improve the platform after noticing mistakes which might not be suspected in the Demo version). Later, the platform will be released in other cities in Europe monthly (1-2 cities per month). It will take no longer than 2 years to release A2B in all planned cities.
Team
A2B Taxi is not a newcomer in the taxi industry. Our team has the experience of 5 years in taxi services. At the moment, we are managing Amber Vilnius, Ltd. and Amber Motors, Ltd. These companies are labelled with the brand A2B and are located in Vilnius, Lithuania. Currently A2B provides the services of taxi in Vilnius with a fleet of 40 Volkswagen and Skoda vehicles.
There are more than 100 employees in the company and our annual turnover of A2B is expected to be more than 2 million Euros this year, what means that the performance is profitable.
Both public and private sector use our services (including the biggest banks, legal firms and audit companies). Today there are 252 long-term contracts signed with various institutions in Lithuania.
● A2B TAXI website: http://www.a2btaxi.io
● WHITEPAPER LINK
● TELEGRAM CHAT LINK
● FACEBOOK LINK
● TWITTER LINK
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