Visa, Planeta Team Up for Better Mobile Payments in Mass Transit

February 27, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

For those who take mass transit on a regular basis, good for you. You’re cutting back on gas use and making sure more of it gets to the countryside, where getting on a train to work is just not an option. A new partnership effort between Visa and Planeta Informatica, meanwhile, looks like it will make mass transit even easier than ever thanks to new advances in contactless payment systems.

Visa has been working on improving contactless options for mass transit for some time now, and has its collective hands in the transit systems of 20 different cities contained throughout a total of 12 countries. At last report, Visa had 150 separate projects in an “ongoing” status, and has brought in several partners to make this happen.

In fact, Visa and Planeta recently got together with Ingenico Group to produce one such project, putting Visa SAM in place, which should help Metro Rio launch a contactless transit system that uses several of Ingenico’s own contactless payment systems.

Visa’s global head of urban mobility, Nick Mackie, noted “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. 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.”

No one wants to struggle to use mass transit. It’s already a system that’s largely limited by necessity to urban centers, so why shrink the already-limited pool of potential users by making the tool unnecessarily hard to use? Plus, a lot of people are concerned about germs and the like on mass transit systems, so why not go to a contactless payment system that takes at least one potential infection vector out of the equation?

All told, this system should prove a welcome addition to mass transit riders’ everyday operations. Even if it only trims a little trouble off the day, that’s still a little less trouble than there was before.