The Unicard Platform is the UK’s number-one choice for ITSO ticketing solutions for rail and bus.

We provide the industry-leading ITSO HOPS, Customer Management System, retail channels and supporting services for the most complex and demanding commercial and concessionary transport schemes. Our solutions help you deliver a better passenger experience whilst cutting administrative costs and simplifying workloads, backed by scalable and reliable cloud hosting and a seamless migration process.

Our 80+ customers include local and regional transport authorities, transport operators and hardware suppliers, such as:

• Transport for London
• Rail Delivery Group
• Transport for West Midlands
• Transport for Wales
• Merseytravel
• Transport Scotland
• ITSO
• Smart Applications Management
• Nexus
• Ticketer
• Transmach
• Flowbird
• Init
• Lothian Buses
• National Express West Midlands
• TravelMaster
• Solent Transport

Migration experts

With over 30 ITSO migrations carried out successfully in the last two years, no other supplier can give you the same confidence that your migration will be as smooth and risk-free as possible.

We have established and tested processes, tools, expertise and know-how - based on past migrations from other ITSO suppliers - that standardise the procedures of data migration and infrastructure changes. This ensures minimal customer and supplier impact, no loss of data, and minimal downtime – sometimes as little as half a day.

Future-proofed

The Unicard Platform is guaranteed to be certified for ITSO 2.1.5, ensuring continued compliance with ITSO rules now and into the future.

However, passengers increasingly prefer to travel with an existing bank card, and transport operators are increasing the use of barcode tickets. Our systems are multi-token and multi-modal, providing the ability to integrate your ITSO ticketing with other tokens such as cEMV bank cards, barcode tickets or in-app ticketing. This provides a more integrated transport network for your passengers, and future-proofs your scheme against changes in tokens in the future – whilst ensuring that passengers who receive concessionary discounts or do not have a bank account are not discriminated against.

With advanced reporting built in, our platform can also be fully integrated with data warehousing, business intelligence systems, and third-party applications, ensuring you can unlock the power of your data and take advantage of major trends such as Artificial Intelligence.

Efficient systems

As the first provider to offer a cloud HOPS, our use of Amazon Web Services ensures your systems are scalable and reliable so they can deal with changes in demand whilst keeping costs low. What’s more, our AWS environment runs on 100% renewable energy, reducing your carbon footprint and helping with Net Zero goals.

It is not just the servers that are efficient: the slick user experience and dedicated time-saving administrative tools built into our platform, based on over 10 years of experience running smart ticketing schemes, ensure that your people can work faster and with fewer errors, maximising your investments in staffing and reducing the need for training – as well as boosting customer engagement with your portals.

The Unicard CMS, portals and mobile app offer a full solution for registration, ticket retail, and fulfilment, and can also cut down calls to your contact centre with built-in features for online self-service including document re-uploads and rejection handling, updating personal details, reporting lost and stolen cards, renewals, and payments, plus the option to integrate with Interactive Voice Response Systems.

Support and services

As a founder-led UK SME of over 20 years, and the only independent provider of ITSO HOPS, we understand the importance of responsive, personalised customer service. Our solutions are backed with 24/7 technical support, utilising advanced monitoring and alerting tools to spot issues, and a responsive service desk for business-as-usual changes and information requests.

You will also receive a nominated account manager with a personalised development plan that understands and works with you to develop your future plans for smart ticketing. In addition to standard customer support, we offer a variety of managed service options, tailored specifically to your specific scheme, that can take over from your in-house teams and free them up to work in other areas.

Development roadmap

All of our cloud products are under active development, and have been continuously improved and updated since their implementation – not left unloved for years. Our entire customer base can contribute feature ideas and user experience improvements to be included in our development roadmaps, meaning every customer benefits from the combined expertise and best practices developed by the UK’s smart ticketing community.

Each product is updated at least once per quarter with new features, enhancements, security patches and performance upgrades – the vast majority of which are included at no extra charge in your licence fee. And if you don’t want to wait, our in-house development team, consultants and business analysts can work with you to understand your bespoke development needs and build a customised solution.

Customer Management System

• Complete commercial and concessionary scheme management
• User-friendly interface and timesaving admin tools
• Advanced Customer Relationship Management built in
• Easy-to-use customer self-service portal, retail functions, and reporting tool
• Support for non-ITSO token types such as cEMV and barcode
• Fully flexible registration workflows, data fields and scheme rules
• Manages card production, third-party data sources, payments and other integrations

ITSO HOPS

• Full compliance with the ITSO specification, including 2.1.5 when released
• Tested data migration capabilities
• Advanced data reporting built directly into the user interface
• Fully scalable and tested to over 3 million transactions a day
• Asset Management System to manage tens of thousands of ISAMs
• Pre-existing integrations with POST equipment suppliers, third-party CMS and apps
• Enhanced ITSO functionality if using other Unicard products

SDKs and middleware

• Class-leading Part 11 functionality for remote ticket downloads with near-immediate delivery of fulfilments
• ITSO card reader middleware that is used by most POSTs in the UK
• API access is available to all Unicard products for third parties to securely access ticket scheme data and functionality
• Dedicated SDKs to connect mobile apps and TVMs to ITSO cards for loading tickets and inspecting card contents

Rail

• The ITSO HOPS and CMS are optimised for use by railway operators
• A dedicated solution for issuing ITSO smartcard tickets and new fulfilments to existing cards
• Accredited TIS with SDCI+ creation and RSPS3002 compliant
• Fully integrated with RDG Central Back Office HOPS and TMS
• Support for barcode, cEMV and magstripe tickets and data

To discuss your migration plan and for a demonstration of how Unicard’s ITSO solutions can work for you, please contact sales@unicard-uk.com