Whilst I like the idea of Apple Pay - it does take little longer at the gate - as does contactless.
I’m still using Oyster with auto-topup from Monzo. I prefer it this way as my feed is a little cleaner and has less delayed transcations.
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With Monday-Sunday capping and algorithms such as the one the Londonist people explain, it’s hard not to conclude that TfL is fed up with paying its license fee for Oyster and would sooner we stopped using it.
I have one spare Oyster card for visitors. I used to have four - one in each of three wallets and a spare. Now it’s just my Monzo and the spare.
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All of the contactless benefits are supposed to be coming to Oyster soon enough. TfL are moving Oyster processing to the same backend systems as they use for contactless at the moment at which point feature parity will occur.
Who are they paying licences to? The backend stuff is licenced out to others.
I think Fujitsu who built and maintain the system and associated hardware.
Hmm. I know the gate line system is from Cubic and I believe it’s they (amongst others?) who are licensing the TfL backend for use elsewhere. I thought all other players had had their interests bought out or something.
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This will be fixed in the current round of improvements to TfL. 
Reprocess Oyster journeys using Contactless logic to ensure an identical charging outcome
http://content.tfl.gov.uk/csopp-20170713-part-1-item11-ticketing-improvements-for-customers.pdf (Slide 7)
As for contactless speed, our new debit cards should be faster at the gate than the prepaid cards by around 0.5–1 second in my testing, bringing it in line with all other contactless cards but still very slightly slower than the latest generation of Oyster due to the lack of local storage on the card that TfL can read from or write to.
Apple Pay and Android Pay have identical speeds to contactless cards but many people don’t pre-arm their devices when walking up to the gates, causing those critical seconds of confusion. Apple resolved this with in Japan with Suica by introducing the concept of an ‘Express Transit card’ where Touch ID authentication would be skipped for the one card in that slot.
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Make your mind up… 
Aha. Both right! Cubic were part of a consortia originally contracted to provide the system, but the IP was evidently TfLs, it seems and they terminated the contract early because it kept going wrong, fixed it, and licenced it back to Cubic for use outside London. #nuts
To be fair, I did have a job interview with Cubic a couple of years ago 
I never heard from them again 
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Cool! Thanks for the info. Look forward to the speed increase, it is quite noticeable at the moment and every second counts in the London rush hour 
Talking of payment by card, I wish people would use Apple Pay or Android Pay on the tube in London instead of Oyster card or Contactless. The number of times I’ve been held up at the barriers by people searching through their bags to little effect recently 
Just joking! 
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Thanks for pointing this out. I only use Apple Pay on TfL - I wouldn’t if it was slower than contactless. Obviously not everyone is aware that they can pre-arm it. And if you don’t then it’s significantly slower.
Oh by the way, just a heads up to the Amex users, there’s 5% cashback on TfL till the end of the month I believe 
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I miss the days when MasterCard gave free travel on Fridays on TfL
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They also have to hold a huge amount of money in their accounts for pre-pay top ups which is practically never going to be used. It’s not money they can spend, as it could in theory have to be refunded to users at any point. They’ve got to employ a huge team to deal with all the customer service issues. Going full contactless would end up saving them a fortune in the long run.
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As someone who isn’t a Londoner: Contactless, all the way. Oyster is too much of a hassle full-stop, and the ticket machines at Kings Cross underground are horrifyingly packed at all times of the day.
I have like £5.05 on my Oystercard that I know won’t use as I never carry it now.
I had mine refunded - if it is a newer card you can do it at the machine, the oldest ones have to be done at one of the offices
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or online if you have set up an online account and registered your Oyster card with it