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The Moscow Department of Transport has announced it is launching a test of its planned “MultiTransport” mobility-as-a-service platform, which will enable users to plan and pay for rides on the Moscow Metro and other public transit, along with taxis. The city said it is planning to add other transport modes, including car-share and bike and scooter rental.

Moscow Metro has 45,000 users for its Face Pay service since launching its rollout of facial recognition fare-payments in mid-October, the transit agency said today, in releasing more details about how the service works.

Updated: The Spokane Transit Authority in Washington state confirmed that its new fare-collection system will include contactless open-loop payments–with a beta test planned for next October, a spokesman told NFC Times' sister publication Mobility Payments.

A fourth city in Finland is beginning to roll out contactless open-loop payments, with “more in the pipeline,” according to one supplier on the project, making the Nordic country one of the latest hotspots for the technology.

The Central Ohio Transit Authority, or COTA, officially launched its new digital-payments service Monday, including a fare-capping feature that the agency estimates will cost it $1.8 million per year in lost fare revenue, the agency confirmed to Mobility Payments.

Skånetrafiken, the transit agency serving one of Sweden’s largest counties, announced today it has expanded its contactless open-loop payments service to include the Express Mode feature for Apple Pay.

Touting it as the largest rollout of biometric payments in the world, Moscow Metro launched its high-profile “Face Pay” service Friday, as expected, and predicted that 10% to 15% would regularly us

Transit agencies that have rolled out open-loop contactless payments are seeing growing use of NFC wallets to pay fares, as Covid-wary passengers see convenience in tapping their phones or wearables to pay.

Transport for Greater Manchester in the UK is the latest transit agency seeing substantial growth of contactless open-loop fare payments from NFC mobile wallets–with the percentage of its contactless tram trips paid for with Apple Pay, Google Pay and other Pays services more than doubling over the past two years, NFC Times' sister publication Mobility Payments has learned.

Contactless open-loop payments have surged in recent months for Transport for London, returning to their steep growth trajectory before the pandemic, and now account for 70% of all pay-as-you-go, or PAYG, trips on the London Underground and two-thirds of PAYG trips on buses. And contactless has surpassed 50% of all trips–including those made with season tickets (see chart below).

Sydney-based Transport for New South Wales, Australia’s largest transit agency, has no plans to phase out or de-emphasize its closed-loop Opal card, despite strong adoption of contactless open-loop

The Greater Dayton RTA, which this month stopped accepting paper passes and tickets, will hit its Nov. 1 deadline to go completely cashless on board its vehicles, an agency representative confirmed to Mobility Payments.