The OSPT Alliance and UK-Based ITSO forge relationship

GERMANY & UK: The Open Standard for Public Transport (OSPT) Alliance and ITSO Ltd, the organization responsible for the UK national specification for smart ticketing, today announced they have agreed to participate as members in each other’s organizations and to explore ways they can work together to promote the use of open security standards in public transit for smart ticketing and electronic fare collection systems.

Through their shared commitment to the use of open standards, these two leading public transit standards bodies intend to leverage the complementary aspects of their standards and ecosystems and discuss how they could be combined to create solutions that would be mutually beneficial to their respective members.

“We are pleased to have ITSO join the OSPT Alliance as an associate member, and look forward to exploring how our shared vision for the future of open standards in public transit can result in a mutually beneficial relationship,” said Laurent Cremer, executive director for the OSPT Alliance.  “ITSO is an established, recognized player in smart ticketing, and has developed some key technology we believe would be of great interest to OSPT Alliance members as they deploy fare collection systems based on the CIPURSE security standard.”

The CIPURSE open security standard addresses the need by local and regional transit authorities for future-proof fare collection systems with more advanced security than currently in use.  Because it is an open standard, CIPURSE promotes vendor neutrality, cross-vendor system interoperability, lower technology adoption risks, higher quality and improved market responsiveness, all of which result in lower operating costs and greater flexibility for transport system operators.