EMT, the municipal transport operator for Spain’s third largest city Valencia, has called on UK firm Masabi to deliver mobile ticketing and mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) citywide.

The system will see the company’s fare payments platform used to provide ticketing for the operator and MaaS providers’ mobile apps. It will also power third-party validators on buses.

EMT has a fleet of more than 500 buses. Masabi will deliver a fare payment system to make public transport in the city easier to access.

The contract builds on the existing long-term relationship between EMT and Masabi and will allow passengers to pay for public transport in a range of convenient ways, including the new EMT Valencia app as well as other MaaS apps already live in the city. Passengers will be able to pay for public transport and plan their journey all from within the same app.

The system will be enabled using Masabi’s Justride platform, and passengers will benefit from the installation of validation devices across EMT’s bus fleet, enabling faster onboarding with QR codes and providing the foundations for further future innovations including account-based ticketing (ABT) and payments using smartcards or contactless bank cards.

“We’re delighted to see our collaboration with EMT Valencia reach another milestone as we continue to revolutionise public transport across Spain and around the globe,” said Brian Zanghi, CEO of Masabi. “We are excited to be building on our existing mobile ticketing deployment with the city to make taking public transport as simple and quick as possible and to provide a model to other cities in the country.”

The Justride cloud-native and shared platform is in use with over 150 transport authorities and operators of all sizes worldwide including Lurraldebus and Bilbobus in Spain. It means transport authorities and operators that adopt Justride no longer need to purchase their own design-and-build bespoke ticketing systems, which are expensive, slow and risky to deploy, and do not update regularly with new features and functionality unless significant amounts of money are invested.

Instead, using a fare payments-as-a-service approach, authorities and operators can benefit from the latest innovations delivered quickly and cost-effectively, with regular feature updates.

Justride is used by more than 150 public transit agencies and operators of all sizes across nine countries. Masabi has offices in New York, Denver, London and Cluj.

EMT Valencia has 1700 employees who ensure provision of the public service. In 2019, around 97 million travellers used the public buses, ten per cent more than four years previous, and the company was the highest scoring municipal service as evaluated by all citizens in Valencia.