A partnership between Visa and Planet Informatica has yielded the Visa Secure Access Module (SAM) — a new technology meant to help public transit operators collect payments through contactless cards, phones or wearable devices.
The goal is faster and cheaper collection. While new technology always comes with its own set of costs, the companies ascertain that it would allow these transit to modernize without replacing current turnstiles or terminal hardware. Customers would no longer need to wade through lines or reload tickets and the companies collecting their funds would slash their overhead. It will be available to any Visa Ready technology partners.
“This is a transformational development for public transit operators that want to improve their customers’ journeys and reduce their operational costs by removing the need for tickets or topping up fare cards,” Nick Mackie, Global Head of Urban Mobility for Visa, said. “Through our work with Planeta Informatica, we have pioneered a way to accelerate the shift to contactless transit that is scalable and highly secure, while generating time and cost savings for transit operators by removing the hurdles of replacing potentially thousands of transit readers across the transport system.”
Metro Rio was also revealed as the first transit operator to utilize the system. That will be overseen by the Ingenico Group, which will work to implement the Visa SAM into their systems by late April.