Aconite Technology Ltd. and Traderoot Africa (Pty) Ltd., its partner in South Africa, are working together to supply a prepaid contactless chip card system for South Africa’s new integrated public transit network.
The project, scheduled to go live this summer, will enable public taxi-bus riders to purchase tickets using contactless smart cards or, potentially, NFC-enabled mobile phones.
According to Aconite, replacing cash with smart cards will reduce costs while mitigating fraud and theft, as well as speed up the fare transaction process.
For the system, Aconite will provide its Prepaid Value Manager software to Traderoot for integration into Traderoot’s Universal Prepaid Issuing Platform (UPIP) product.
The system can manage closed or open-loop smart prepaid/pre-authorized payment products that may be accepted in offline and/or online point-of-sale terminals.
According to Aconite, a smart prepaid/pre-authorized system, which can be used in offline terminals, is ideal in places where online authorization is either impractical, uneconomic, unreliable or non-existent.
The initial pilot launch will deploy 50,000 cards, after which card numbers are expected rise to 800,000 within 12 months and 2,000,000 in 24 months as the solution is rolled out to all elements of the integrated mass transit network.
The target of 10 million cards is expected to be reached within 3 years. ![[end]](/resources/bullet/contactlessnews-4.gif)
