Representatives from both the Metropolitan Transportation Authority NYC Transit (MTA) and the Utah Transit Authority (UTA) spoke about their respective pilot programs, which have added bank-issued contactless cards into their closed payment systems, at the kick off to the Smart Card Alliance’s annual conference in San Diego. Both the MTA and UTA are also testing a way to make using contactless cards even more profitable by grouping many small payments together and presenting them as one transaction to the merchant acquiring system, a process called aggregation. Grouping payments would in turn lower the transit agencies’ transaction costs. The UTA’s program accepts bank-issued contactless cards on 41 ski buses in Salt Lake City. Meanwhile, the MTA’s program includes 79 turnstiles in 30 stations across four NYC boroughs.