Brings Valuable Development Expertise to Elaboration of CIPURSE Standard

MUNICH, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As membership momentum continues to build, the Open Standard for Public Transport™ (OSPT™) Alliance today announced that ZeitControl of Germany has joined the OSPT Alliance as a Member. ZeitControl provides innovative programmable technology to the transportation market with products ranging from programmable smartcards to RFID labels with integrated microprocessors.

“We welcome ZeitControl and are delighted that the company endorses the value of the CIPURSE™ open security standard”

“We welcome ZeitControl and are delighted that the company endorses the value of the CIPURSE™ open security standard,” said Laurent Cremer, executive director of the OSPT Alliance. “ZeitControl will be a wonderful asset to our membership and we look forward to their contributions.”

ZeitControl Cardsystems has consistently delivered innovative products to market. Its BasicCard solution enabled customers to program smartcards in the BASIC programing language, providing fast, flexible development of customized smartcard applications. ZeitControl also provides development kits for RFID transponders and transponder tags. The company also introduced the world’s first RFID label with integrated microprocessor, which combines its expertise in programmable secure smart cards with extensive knowledge in the RFID sector. The company recently won a tender from the German National Transportation Agency (VDV) to supply the agency with four to eight million contactless BasicCards.

“Contactless and other forms of transaction capabilities are changing transit,” said Wolfgang Salge, managing director of ZeitControl. “The CIPURSE open standard enables us to expand our offering to new markets while participating in the growth of modern transit and ticketing solutions.”

OSPT Alliance Members are commercial companies that are developing or intend to develop new CIPURSE-based products. They have complete access to specification documentation, working groups, certification, and other benefits. Associate members include transit agencies, industry associations involved in transit, and universities and research institutions with projects in public transportation. The OSPT Alliance also makes the CIPURSE specification available to evaluators who can download and review the specification after agreeing to a click-through license.

The OSPT Alliance offers the CIPURSE open security standard to address transit authorities’ need for future-proof fare collection systems with advanced security. As an open standard, CIPURSE promotes vendor neutrality and cross-vendor system interoperability with reduced technology adoption risks, higher quality and improved market responsiveness—all of which can result in lower operating costs and greater flexibility for transport system operators. CIPURSE offers a global basis for rapidly migrating transit fare systems to NFC-enabled mobile phones and other devices, and supports the adoption of NFC transit applications for a truly future-proof solution. CIPURSE V2, the latest version of the standard, is available for download from the OSPT Alliance web site at www.osptalliance.org.

About the OSPT Alliance

The OSPT Alliance is an international association chartered to define a new open standard for secure transit fare collection solutions. It provides industry education, creates workgroup opportunities and catalyzes the development and adoption of innovative fare collection technologies, applications and services. The OSPT Alliance was founded by leading technology companies, and membership is open to technology providers, transit operators, consultants, solution vendors, government agencies and other stakeholders in the transit ecosystem. For additional information, please visit www.osptalliance.org.