Driving speed and convenience for commuters while enhancing operational efficiency and optimizing costs for transport operators. 

India’s payment landscape has undergone a paradigm shift over the past decade. Digital payment technologies such as online and mobile payments, Bharat QR, and Unified Payments Interface (UPI) have transformed the payment experience, driving speed, ease of use, and safety for consumers while making everyday payments. Apart from retail and utility payments, advancements in digital payment technologies have also enabled secure and cashless payments at toll plazas, for bus and metro tickets, enhancing the travel experience for commuters. The digitalisation of transit payments is a significant step towards realising the Smart City and Digital India vision.

For public transport systems such as metros, transport operators have traditionally adopted a contactless ticketing system for fare collection using smart cards and tokens (closed-loop) that are either transit-specific or operator-specific to enable cashless payments. With government initiatives like the Smart National Common Mobility Card (NCMC) programme that envisions one card for all payments (transit as well as retail), metros are now adopting the open-loop card-based ticketing system, redefining public transportation and the way transit payments are made.

The open-loop card-based ticketing service based on NCMC specifications provides efficient interoperability, driving convenience for both transport operators and commuters. Having a common card enables every passenger to make retail payments as well as transit payments across all transit modes and operators, optimising the operational cost for transport operators while driving convenience for passengers, as a single card can meet all payment requirements. As a result, major metros are now migrating from a closed-loop ticketing system to the NCMC-based open-loop ticketing system, while new metros are adopting the open-loop ticketing system from the initial stages.

Though digital payments have seen phenomenal growth in the recent past, it is important to further drive penetration and make digital payments more pervasive. Given that the transit use case opens a whole new segment of the population who will start using cards regularly, it allows for faster adoption of digital payments and enables the country to take one step further towards the Digital India vision.

Hitachi Payment Services is one of the leading players in the transit payment sector, offering innovative payment solutions for buses, metros, and parking. The open-loop card-based ticketing service (acquiring) for metros provides efficient interoperability and is among the first open-loop card-based ticketing systems implemented in India on qSPARC 2.0 (NCMC) standards, pioneering the transition from a conventional closed-loop to an open-loop ticketing system in public transport.