Transport industry looks to mimic Open Banking

The Open Transport Initiative, a team of transport and technology specialists led by Glasgow-based digital consultancy firm, Ideal Interface, has published a draft open standard to facilitate peer-to-peer transport account data sharing.

The initiative, launched earlier this year, has quickly gathered interest from public transport authorities and operators across the UK and Europe.

The group said it aims to do for the transport sector what Open Banking has done for the financial services sector – adding that the creation of an open standard for online transport account sharing is now essential.

The draft standard incorporates an API document allowing the customer to view all of their transportation, mobility and associated data in one place, rather than searching across numerous apps and websites to join-up the journey, ticket and discount data.

The Open Transport Initiative, which has had wider input from rail, ferry, subway, bus and parking representatives, as well as academia, aims to introduce an approved standard as early as the end of this year.

“Since early 2018 the financial services market across Europe has been adopting Open Banking, an approach that allows secure interoperability of personal accounts between banks, which puts the customer more in control of their finances,” Hayden Sutherland, founder and director of Ideal Interface said.

“This is the right time to put [our] draft standard out to review. For us, this is the next step in getting the Open Transport accepted as a ratified standard. This is an enabler for true mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) schemes,” Sutherland added.