OSPT Alliance Forms Systems-Level Standardization Working Group to Support Convergence

Industry body OSPT Alliance has launched a new working group focusing on systems-level standardization to support public transport authorities (PTAs). The group will support the creation of products and services that allow PTAs to interface easily with adjacent systems, both in transport and other sectors.

OSPT Alliance promotes CIPURSE, the open standard that offers an advanced foundation for developing interoperable fare collection systems. Beyond the secure ticketing media enabled by CIPURSE, however, transport operators and authorities also have to procure many other products and services to build and manage a ticketing infrastructure.

As digital technology continues to transform more and more services, it becomes increasingly important for operators to open their ticketing systems beyond proprietary closed loop operation to enable convergence between transport ticketing and other services.

“CIPURSE is a game changer in standardization for operators from the secure element perspective. But to maximize the benefits of CIPURSE open standards implementation and interoperability, it’s also important to enable standardization beyond the secure element,” said Laurent Cremer, executive director, OSPT Alliance.

The new working group’s objective is to develop a set of specifications and certification services available to public transport stakeholders, industry leaders, SMEs and mobile application developers. These will help them produce commercial products and services that will bring the benefits of open standards based solutions to public transport operators, authorities and other adjacent value chains, allowing them to interface with other systems. These benefits include competitive pricing, interoperability, the ability to source multiple vendors, and creating value for PTAs and their potential partners in areas like mobile commerce and mobile banking.

Cremer added, “Using the open standard CIPURSE enables operators to take advantage of convergence and to meet consumer expectations that digital tools will reach far beyond transport and payments. The aim of this working group is to make it as easy as possible for transport operators to meet those expectations.”

The systems-level standardization working group is currently recruiting new members for this valuable work.