Macquarie Bank's Lime taxi service received licensing go-ahead from the NSW Department of Transport last Thursday afternoon after a six month wait. Steve Albin, the Macquarie Bank exec in charge of putting the taxi service, including its payments infrastructure on the road, told The Sheet yesterday that "I'm going nuts taking calls from important people in the payments industry who want to know about this." The bank's target is for 240 Lime taxis in 12 months that will carry a new payments system into the taxi market to take on the monopoly provider, Cabcharge. Contributors to the development of the system include Westpac, SecurePay and Optus. Lime's taxis will use Keycorp K23 terminals, fully integrated with the taxi service's dispatch system"We've gone into this and stumbled across a real winner in terms of payments systems…. This can make a real change in the taxi payments market," Albin said.Communication will be over the Optus GSM network, and a pretty excited Albin said they have not identified any black spots or indeed any glitches with the system at all."Westpac, Optus, SecurePay, Keycorp and our people here at Macquarie have done a great job in bringing this to the stage it is at - ready for market - so quickly.""We are payments card industry compliant and while the network authorisation has taken a little longer than expected we will be in the market in a matter of months." Under Lime, drivers will get a cut of each transaction and a guaranteed payment no matter what type of payment card a customer uses, which will be delivered to the driver's bank account overnight. Driver's using Lime's payment system will not be able to accept Cabcharge cards.Disabled people will have to choose which network to adopt as there will be separate call centres, numbers and dispatch systems."This is the next step, the next generation in taxi payments. It's not the reason we went into this project, but we have happened to design something that satisfies our risk people, and reduces payments risk to the driver, we are very happy with it," said Albin.Steve Albin said the five year targets for the Lime taxi service are to get around 20 to 25 per cent of the Sydney taxi market, with the service providing more than 1000 cabs. The vehicles will be wheelchair accessible Mercedes Vito people movers and seat six people, catering to larger groups of people than conventional sedans.The existing 312 disabled cabs in Sydney carry less than six disabled fares per cab per week, according to rival Cabcharge, so Lime obviously intends to primarily chase conventional taxi demand.Macquarie for its part says the transport options available to disabled people in Sydney are limited and that wheelchair jobs face long wait times, often one hour. Cabcharge says 73 per cent of jobs are picked up within 15 minutes. Cabcharge figures also suggest that growth in jobs for wheelchair accessible taxis is growing strongly at 45 per cent in the two years to March 2006, more