The aim of the Open Mobile Ticketing Alliance is to enable the vision of Register once, travel anywhere by developing open, interoperable standards with payment vendors and transit operators.
Other founding members include transportation service providers Scheidt & Bachmann and Thales, and mobile payment provider Verifone Mobile Money.
Instead of buying a ticket or reloading an electronic card, passengers will register with the service once and then they can tap phones enabled with near field communication (NFC) technology at transit systems around the globe in order to travel. OMTA helps standardize the communication between phone and transit infrastructure and facilitates roaming between systems so that users can use an app they are familiar with rather than starting from scratch each time they travel to a new city.
Over the past few months at the InnoTrans trade fair in Berlin, Germany, and the APTA EXPO in Houston, US, Alliance members showcased results from pre-commercial pilots started in 2014 and demonstrated a solution based on the OMTA standard and the HERE Maps application. HERE Maps is available on iOS, Android and Windows Phone and already allows users to plan public transit journeys in a number of cities around the world.
Alliance members are expected to bring products based on OMTA to consumers in several cities around the world later in 2015 through transit agency trials.
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