Membership Expansion Boosts OSPT Alliance’s Growing Influence

Industry body OSPT Alliance has attained the milestone of 65 members on its fifth anniversary. In addition, nearly 1000 organizations have downloaded OSPT Alliance’s ready to use CIPURSE standard for evaluation, reflecting the growing interest in open ticketing standards amongst transport operators and other service providers.

CIPURSE is an open standard that offers an advanced foundation for developing interoperable fare collection systems. OSPT Alliance membership currently comprises full members, who have the right to develop products following the CIPURSE standard and associate members, who have the right to develop systems that use CIPURSE products.

The growth in membership has coincided with associate members outnumbering full members for the first time, a trend that is expected to continue throughout 2016.

Laurent Cremer, OSPT Alliance’s executive director said, “Reaching 65 members is an amazing achievement in as little as five years. This, combined with the new balance of membership types and the number of evaluators who have downloaded the CIPURSE open standard, shows that CIPURSE is gaining acceptance in its target markets. It demonstrates that service providers want to use an open standard for ticketing and transportation and want to develop services without being beholden to proprietary solution providers.”

OSPT Alliance membership now covers the full card and mobile ecosystem, including: chip manufacturers, operating system providers, inlay and card manufacturers, personalization and fulfilment services, mobile operators and HCE developers. In addition, transport operators, MNOs and retail service providers are also represented.

“Thanks to our technical work over the past five years, this comprehensive spread of membership and the resulting wide range of CIPURSE-certified products on all media types make CIPURSE a fully ready out-of-the box solution, which can integrate with existing systems,” adds Cremer.

“Over the next five years we will focus on showing that CIPURSE is the open standards solutions for operators wanting to launch convenient-to-use services quickly and easily across a wide range of application areas. It integrates smoothly with existing systems, making it easy to switch to and implement, and all CIPURSE products are independently qualified by an external lab to validate that products perform as advertised. We want to make sure that CIPURSE is featured in every new system specification.”

In response to its growing importance in transit ticketing and elsewhere, mobile will continue to be a major area of focus for OSPT Alliance throughout 2016 and beyond, through the work of its HCE and mobile working groups.

This focus is expected to be reflected in a growth in membership from mobile operators. Further technical focuses will be account based solutions and system level integration.

OSPT Alliance will also launch a further membership type during 2016 for companies making terminal and reader equipment that read CIPURSE products.