ESP Systex

ESP's love affair with ITSO began in 2000 following our successful implementation of large-scale Concessionary Travel Pass projects at Nexus and Nottinghamshire County Council which was the first truly interoperable smart card project to be implemented in the UK.

It was clear to us that a National Standard for Interoperable Smartcards in a Transport Environment would be of enormous benefit to the LAs, PTEs, Operators and Suppliers involved in this area, and its early introduction would accelerate the market expansion of smart card based solutions. So, we made the decision to commit dedicated resources to ITSO development as our highest priority to ensure we remained in-touch and ahead of the game.

The five years of listening, contributing and developing have now paid off with attainment of our Full ITSO Certification for our ESP 'SECSy' Perso POST (card issuance systems) which covers all ITSO Product Entities and all Card Media other than Calypso i.e.

  • Specification v2.1, currently implemented to Technical Note 0072
  • IPE's 0, 2, 3, 4, 5, 14, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 plus Shell, Directory & Transient Ticket IPEs
  • Card Platforms 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

However, our work does not end here - ITSO is a living and evolving standard and we will continue to commit resource to ensuring that we keep fully up-to-date by incorporating relevant Technical Notes and ISADs as they arise. Our policy will be to roll-out these updates to our systems' user community on a regular basis and ensure they are all synchronised through careful version control.

Justification of our commitment to ITSO is now starting to materialise and we have active ITSO projects in progress with:

  • Cheshire County Council - legacy to ITSO migration project
  • Nottinghamshire County Council - legacy to ITSO migration project
  • Capita's ITSO 'Connexions Card' pilot scheme in London
  • Merseytravel's Smart Enabled Ticket project
  • The Improvement Service's Scottish Entitlement Card project

In addition to being able to offer ITSO Certified Card Personalisation Systems for local issuance of ITSO cards on-demand we have also equipped our three Service Bureaux with 80 x ITSO enabled workstations providing a combined capacity for issuing over 150,000 personalised ITSO cards per week.

For more information visit www.espsystex.co.uk .