Littlepay has launched contactless transit payments in Finland’s capital Helsinki and its second largest urban area, the city of Tampere.

Last year, Littlepay was awarded a contract with Helsinki Regional Transport (HSL) and TVV lippu- ja maksujärjestelmä Oy (LMJ) to enable contactless EMV payments on public transport in Helsinki and in other Finnish cities. This is the first phase of the project, which includes tap-to-pay on selected ferries and trams in Helsinki and on buses operated by Nysse in Tampere. The project will continue with multimodal rollouts across the cities’ transit systems. 

“We believe our riders will appreciate the convenience of the new systems we are putting in place,” said Mari Flink, director of HSL’s customer experience and sales department. “On public transport, it’s so simple to tap a contactless card or device on a reader, rather than queuing to buy a travel card or ticket, or downloading a transit app.”

The fare collection systems being used in Helsinki and Tampere are an example of Littlepay’s modular approach. Both use Littlepay for transit payment processing and Nets for card scheme connectivity. However, the solutions vary in their choice of integrated hardware. In Helsinki, PPT Excellence validators handle card taps, while in Tampere, hardware is provided by Pusatec and Logos.

Other features of the contactless payment projects include:

• A localized merchant portal with Finnish and Swedish translations and Euro currency support.

• Enhanced fare capping rules in Tampere to introduce zonal, time-based capping.

• The Littlepay fare inspection app, called Littlepay Inspect, to support inspection on- and off-vehicles in Helsinki, automatically checking cards against a list of known taps.

Another one of HSL’s objectives with this project is to begin a migration towards account-based ticketing in Finland’s cities, which would mean travel rights and travel product rules are controlled in a back-end system. To facilitate this, a later phase of the project will involve the use of Littlepay’s recently developed back-office API to integrate a back-office with the payment platform.