teppay is a forthcoming code-based payment service from JR East, which was planned as part of the Suica Renaissance (and also Suica 2.0) project. The original stated design goal of this project was to remove the 20,000 yen maximum limit on Suica, the FeliCa-based transit IC card that served as the basis for the entire nationwide mutually recognized IC card network in Japan.

I strongly believe this service will fail, because it has failed at almost all of the original design goals of Suica, and has no market.

Japan's FeliCa-based transit cards are the best way to pay for everything in Japan, with the single biggest limitation being that there is a 20,000 yen limit. This limit was a limit designed and conceived with the mutual-use IC card network that Suica pioneered. It is “the best” because it is fault tolerant, fast, and can be used by virtually anyone with very little friction. These are the core elements that make Suica an excellent payment method. When using Mobile Suica, either on Android or iOS, payments can be made in the exact same way as a physical card, do not require unlocking your device, and often work in low power reserve modes where the normal phone is dead.

To the average user, some of these properties are not obvious. To elaborate more on these:

• Balance is stored on the card. While a backend service does reconcile payments made at ticket gates and at terminals across Japan, the card itself is a trusted source of balance in most cases. This enables stored-fare transactions to occur entirely offline, such as during disaster scenarios or normal faults during the day. A fare gate need not be fully online at the time of transaction to process normal transactions. This makes Suica highly reliable even in a country where natural disasters can and do occur, taking out internet service at scale.
• FeliCa is fast. Because balance is stored on the card and reconciliation is not required immediately at a ticket gate, the process by which an average person goes through a ticket gate is very very fast. Suica is designed to run the full transaction in under 200ms. Compared to using a credit card, which has a design goal of 300-500ms, Suica offers significantly faster transactions.

teppay is a code-based payment service, like PayPay, Mercari Pay, FamiPay, or quite frankly, dozens of other payment providers. It offers a separate payment balance that is distinct from Suica, so it is not an extension of the 20,000 yen limit. On the other hand, unlike Suica, it requires a user to unlock their device, for both the POS and for the device to have a persistent internet connection, and cannot be topped up or charged using Apple Pay or Suica. The only thing teppay seems to offer over PayPay is the ability to recharge Mobile Suica from inside the app. That's it.

• Where is the balance? With Suica, it's stored on a card. With teppay, your teppay balance is stored in the cloud, just like other payment apps. There is no offline fault tolerance.
• Is teppay fast? You have to unlock your phone and perform a relatively complicated dance to pay, involving getting a cashier to scan your barcode or scan another barcode yourself. This is already slower than 200ms.
• The launch press release states that teppay will allow users to charge above 20,000 yen after identity verification, up to 300,000 yen. Identity verification is a significantly higher bar to clear than Suica, which can be purchased without any identity verification and can be used indefinitely.

All teppay does is give JR East transaction flow information they didn't have before. Nobody is going to use this service if they already have a code payment app, and most people do (PayPay). While teppay has a point program, so does PayPay, except PayPay has various other stamp cards and other programs that make its point program quite lucrative for those who use it regularly. teppay is a bog-standard point program.

The design goal of the Suica 2.0/Renaissance project was to go beyond the 20,000 yen limit. However, this changes absolutely nothing. JR East can say they've increased the limit all they want, but they haven't. They've just created a barcode payment service that slots into the existing Suica app (PASMO coming later), which has a whopping 2.3/5 star rating on the App Store.