AContactless payment for public transport tickets is coming to Naples, but in addition to the subway and buses, citizens and tourists will also be able to use credit cards on trains throughout the region and on the funicular. Campania will thus be the first region in Italy to adopt an integrated digital payment system for public transport. This is thanks to the agreement between Sia and the UnicoCampania Consortium, which brings together 17 local public transport companies. The trial will start in the second half of 2020 in Naples, Salerno, Avellino and their respective provinces for payment of local public transport tickets using contactless credit and debit cards. Once fully operational, it will be possible to pay for tickets for the subway, train, funicular and bus networks with cards equipped with NFC technology, even virtualized on smartphones and wearable devices. It will also be possible, thanks to Sia's infrastructure, to use your credit card as if it were a season ticket: after purchasing the season ticket online with a contactless credit card, users will be able to use the same card to travel on the entire public transport network in Campania. "Soon Naples and all the provincial capitals of Campania will join the ranks of large cities, such as Milan, Venice and Rome, that are using our platform to digitize millions of travel tickets", says Sia's marketing & sales director, Eugenio Tornaghi, hoping that "Campania will lead the way for other regions", because "an integrated payment system for transport, completely contactless, is almost an absolute novelty in the world panorama". The goal of Sia, an Italian company active in the creation and management of infrastructures and technological services to support financial institutions, is to "modernize local transport, bringing this simplification and the habit of using credit and debit cards into the lives of citizens". The service is based on Sia's technological infrastructure that will connect all the terminals where cards can be swiped to access public transport in Campania, as well as the payment circuits and the regional system for calculating fares. The system will also allow users to benefit from the best available fare based on the number of trips made. "Since its inception, the Unicocampania Consortium has been a forerunner in tariff integration, creating one of the most complex models, in terms of the number of actors involved and its territorial extension - underlines the president of Unicocampania, Gaetano Ratto - We are ready, within the scope of the broader investments that the Campania Region is allocating for technological development, to face - flanked by a prestigious partner like SIA - a new chapter in the long history of Unicocampania's conquests".
Article published on November 27, 2019 - 14:20
