Good luck to the English Midlands in their ambition to create an Oyster card style (it could easily use debit cards as the card) public transport payment system. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-54350036?__twitter_impression=true

Let us see if this effort achieves any greater success than the many similar efforts to create smartcards across large geographies in the UK, none of which have worked, for reasons that I see no evidence have been resolved here.

The largest country I know of with a universal national public transport smartcard system is the Netherlands. The OV-chipkaart is an excellent system (with lots of potential for improvement too) and there is so much to learn from its history and deployment.

Setting the level of ambition at the whole of the English Midlands does not suggest that much has been learned.

The OV-chipkaart was started by local government in Rotterdam. It covered just Rotterdam to start with. Then some other local governments decided to join in. And the rest is history.

Here are my previous pieces on good travel smartcards and why we don't have them in the UK (except for London).
1/ Why British buses don’t have tap-to-pay, from 2016. https://www.tomforth.co.uk/taptopay/ 
2/ How the British obsession with complexity fails us, from 2017. https://www.tomforth.co.uk/transportcomplexity/

3/ Why requiring #opendata on fares data will be hard to get right and why it answers the question people were asking instead of fixing the problem that they have. From 2017 https://www.tomforth.co.uk/faresdata/ 

All my blog posts on transport are here. TLDR: We don't have good public transport smartcard systems in the UK because we are unusually keen on,
1/ National government control.
2/ Avoiding postcode lotteries.
3/ Complex solutions to quite simple problems. https://www.tomforth.co.uk/allposts/#Transport

Tap to pay with automatic capping on Greater Manchester's trams is very good and continually getting better and it is proof that with local control, local accountability, and capital investment these things can work brilliantly.

And of course I get compatibility between Greater London and Greater Manchester, tap in tap out with my debit card and I know I'll be charged the best price, without anyone in London ever having to talk to anyone in Manchester. No UK government national standards required.

Please no more "what about ITSO?" replies. It solves absolutely none of the major barriers to more places in the UK having integrated public transport smartcards. In many ways (because it was a national standards and national standards slow innovation) it has made things worse.