CNA Resources

Beyond its original function of collecting revenues from transport, ticketing is now considered as the armed wing of Mobility as a Service, known by the acronym of MaaS. Ticketing must enable mobility services to be combined and offer passengers a seamless, end-to-end, easily accessible transport offer.

Yet this new ambition of ticketing will only be achieved if systems are well designed and highly scalable. This is indeed a major challenge: with streams of new requirements flowing in, linked in particular to MaaS, the need for ticketing systems to be flexible has never been so great. Yet ticketing systems, which are sometimes subject to vendor-locking do not always provide the appropriate solutions to this challenge.

The purpose of this document is to highlight best practices to help ticketing systems reach their target qualities and performance, and to be a tool in the hands of transport authorities and operators to implement their mobility policies.

Account Based Ticketing is already considered as the next major evolution in Ticketing Systems, while Calypso - a card-centric model deployed in 125 cities around the world since 20 years, has been adopted in many contactless ticketing schemes in the world.

By combining the two models, CNA truly believes that each network could take advantage of both worlds, regarding their own issues and specificities.

This white paper marks the first step of a Calypso Networks Association initiative, which aims to raise companies’ awareness to the benefits and shortcomings of Account Based Ticketing.