Dr Rüdiger Grube, CEO of Deutsche Bahn AG, and Guillaume Pepy, President of French National Railways (SNCF), signed a memorandum of understanding in Berlin on 20 September 2016 at InnoTrans, the leading international trade fair for transport technology.

They agreed to bring together their know-how and learnings generated so far in order to inspire and delight their respective customers even further in the future.

“When we look in particular at the major opportunities that digitisation offers for transport companies,” said Grube, "it makes obvious sense to share ideas and methods with SNCF. I believe in doing so, our customers will benefit.”

“With the digital revolution now underway, we need to be as strong as we possibly can —especially in light of the operational and customer challenges,” said Pepy. “This is the purpose of our new cooperation agreement with Deutsche Bahn, on aspects ranging from the way we cooperate with startups to Industrial Internet solutions and further on to onboard connectivity. Working together will not only serve the interests of SNCF’s and DB’s customers, but also those of the mobility community at large.”

Another goal is to identify the requirements that digital data transmission in rail transport will need to meet in the future, so that rail companies can work with the telecommunications industry to improve connectivity for customers and employees.

Both companies have already gained some insight into what it means to work together with startups. Now they intend to learn from each other on how to deal with these new forms of collaboration. They plan to foster innovation by creating joint-event-formats and agree on topics and challenges to be solved by the tech scene accordingly.

(Source: Deutsche Bahn and SNCF)