Transport & Fare Payment Cards

A city’s transit system serves one rider with a monthly pass, another riding free under a concession scheme, a student topping up before school, and a driver’s assistant scanning a staff pass — four different card types, one turnstile. Get the mix wrong and queues build at the reader, complaints pile up at the call centre, and the sleeve the card ships in sits blank when it could be paying for itself.

ZORYA SECURITY PRINTING produces contactless smart cards for public transport fare payment systems — known internationally as transit cards, transport smart cards, bus passes or Automated Fare Collection (AFC) cards. Cards are manufactured in ID-1 format to ISO/IEC 7810, with numbering structured to ISO/IEC 7812 where a bank-card-style identification scheme is required.

Every individually packaged card — personalised or not — ships in a transparent sleeve alongside an information booklet, with matching serial numbers on both. That sleeve and booklet are unused advertising space: cities and transport operators use them to sell ad placements or run public information campaigns, turning card issuance into an extra line of revenue rather than a pure cost.

We work with the full range of contactless chip platforms used in public transport today — NXP MIFARE Classic 1K, MIFARE Ultralight EV1, MIFARE Plus S 2K, and MIFARE-compatible alternatives — all to ISO/IEC 14443 Type A, with data protection up to AES-128 encryption and Common Criteria EAL4+ where the chip supports it.

Cards can be issued for every category a fare system needs:

• standard (non-personalised, general public);
• student / pupil;
• concession (pensioners, people with disabilities, other privileged categories);
• staff and service passes.

Personalisation covers both the graphic side — photo, name, card number, barcode or QR code, expiry date — and the electronic side: reading and logging each chip’s UID, generating PIN/PUK codes under a tamper-evident scratch panel, and building the ID-to-UID database the operator needs to run the system.

Cards are tested to a service life of at least 3 years and a failure rate under 0.5%, in line with ISO/IEC 10373. Personalisation, chip initialisation and packaging all happen on our own automated production line, so serial numbers, UIDs and databases stay in sync batch after batch.

ZORYA SECURITY PRINTING is a certified high-security printer and manufacturer of transport smart cards — ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 22000, ISO 14298 — in line with INTERGRAF’s governmental-level certification requirements.

We supply transport operators and municipal authorities in Ukraine and export to the EU, the Middle East, Africa and the USA.