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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Academy Bus, a large private commuter and charter bus company serving the U.S. East Coast, has launched its first mobile-ticketing service with the SilverPass app, enabling commuters to purchase digital tickets with credit cards or employer benefit cards.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Canada’s third largest city, Calgary, has introduced its first electronic fare payments service, offering mobile ticketing from a software-as-a-service platform provider, with plans to enable customers to pay for fares with their contactless EMV credit and debit cards and NFC wallets.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – U.S.-based Cubic Transportation Systems and Israel-based trip planning app provider Moovit, now owned by Intel, have expanded their partnership to develop mobile services for transit agencies, seeking to enable transit customers to “look, book and pay” for multimodal journeys.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – In what is believed to be a first, a transit agency in Europe plans to accept contactless credit and debit cards using a third-party software-as-a-service platform this summer, UK-based platform provider Masabi told NFC Times, although the company declined to name the agency. The project is expected to begin as a pilot.

NFC TIMES Exclusive – A consortium of 13 small and mid-tier transit agencies in Ohio and Northern Kentucky plans to enable customers to buy public transit tickets directly in the Uber app as early as this summer, following two other U.S. transit agencies, in Denver and Las Vegas, which have already integrated with Uber.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – As the Covid-19 crisis sows fear among mass transit customers and causes ridership on buses, trains and trams to crash, there is heightened interest in mobile ticketing and other electronic fare payments as a way to ease the concerns and help coax wary riders to return.