Article Highlights
Small PSP Littlepay was a surprise pick by major U.S. transit agency WMATA for the agency’s novel “Open-Payment Overlay” project, beating out long-time incumbent Cubic. Now the small Australia-based vendor must hit a tight project deadline.
Cubic will have to integrate more than 4,000 Cubic TR4 (Tri-Reader 4) readers in validators with Littlepay’s SaaS platform. That includes around 2,800 readers across nearly 100 Washington Metro rail stations and 1,500 on board Metrobuses.
• WMATA (Washington, D.C.)
• Littlepay
• Cubic
• Conduent
• HSL (Helsinki)
• OASA (Athens)
• Visa
• Mastercard
Transit agencies in the U.S. and beyond will be watching to see whether a recent gambit by major agency Washington (D.C.) Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to hire small Australia-based payments service provider Littlepay over its large incumbent supplier, Cubic Transportation Systems, pays off.
WMATA made the unexpected move, as Mobility Payments reported earlier this month, to award an important contract to Littlepay to carry out the agency’s “Open-Payment Overlay” project. The overlay–one of the few projects of its kind globally–seeks to add open-loop acceptance on top of the agency’s existing network of closed-loop terminals quickly and cheaply.
It means that WMATA will have to continue to maintain a completely separate legacy closed-loop system, likely for years to come, using older card-based ticketing technology.
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