Conducted by Trans Link Systems and the East West consortium, the program is the first in the world to be implemented on a national scale and will offer integrated solution covering all means of public transport. The program involves 1.4 million contactless cards in its pilot phase, out of the total 12 million cards to be deployed by 2006. Led by industrial consortium, the project is to provide the whole population with a fully contactless, integrated fare system that can be used by the different national transport operators. One single contactless card (the Easyflow ä card by Axalto) will allow the citizen to equally access ferries, buses, metros, trams or trains to travel across the country. More than two million passengers per day are expected to use the national transport once the project is fully implemented. “Not only this program is highly modern, user-friendly and truly interoperable, but this is also the first that goes beyond the typical city-centric fare systems implementations. As such, we suspect it will be closely watched across the globe” comments Chris Jenkins, East-West Managing Director. “To be in phase with the quality and exposure of the program, we expected our smart card partner to combine the highest reliability, the technology expertise and a proven track record of large-scale projects”. www.axalto.com