OSPT Alliance Expands Presence in North America

Dec. 10, 2014
Global industry body launches dedicated North American Sub-Working Group to listen and respond to the needs of this major transit market.

The Open Standard for Public Transport (OSPT) Alliance announced the launch of a North American Sub-Working Group (Sub-WG), consisting of both members and associate members who have an interest in North American public transport and are experts in this field.  

The group’s core activity will center on engaging with stakeholders operating across the North American transport ecosystem to understand current and future ticketing requirements. This will contribute to and communicate the advancement of OSPT Alliance’s open standard CIPURSE. Work will also be undertaken to highlight the benefits of integrating CIPURSE into existing ticketing infrastructures today to deliver cost efficiencies and support multiple, non-transport applications as part of a public / private partnership.

Laurent Cremer, executive director of OSPT Alliance, comments, “We recognize that North America is a key market for the alliance and wanted to demonstrate our commitment by establishing this working group. The alliance understands that each transport community faces different challenges and opportunities and it is vital that we understand and respond to advance the ecosystem. This will only be achieved by having North American representatives contributing to our work.”

The Sub-WG will be chaired by Arnaud Moser, director of marketing and business development, chip cards and security at Infineon Technologies. He adds, “There is a realization from the transport community that an interoperable and vendor-neutral ecosystem will foster the next generation of fare collection and revenue technology. Program owners want to capitalize on multiple-partner projects that can also better support mobile services, such as payment and security, to encourage customer loyalty and engagement.

“Our objective, therefore, is to not only explain how to integrate CIPURSE into fare collection and revenue systems today, but also better understand the unique factors impacting the North American transport community tomorrow and respond in a proactive manner.”