Bank card, cellphone or smartwatch: Indra provides Lisbon’s subway with the most convenient and advanced access system in the world

Indra has made Lisbon one of the first cities in Europe in which travelers can access the subway with their own cellphone, bank card or smartwatch without having to purchase a ticket or pass beforehand, by applying the EMV (Europay-Mastercard-Visa) universal payment technology, while maintaining the other previously existing travel options.

It’s a state-of-the-art payment system that’s much smarter, more streamlined and convenient. Not only does it enhance the traveler experience and provide quick and easy access for everyone visiting the city, it also minimizes plastic and paper consumption and alleviates the work involved in supplying and printing thousands of tickets on a daily basis.

The company has upgraded the access control system with new readers for payments with physical bank cards and virtualized cards, renewed the ticketing back office system, installed in the EMV back office, and integrated the ecosystem into the financial payment gateway to make the charges. The project has been developed in partnership with Metro de Lisboa and other entities such as Visa and LittlePay.

According to Ángeles García Sanz, Director of Transit for Iberia at Indra, “the technological leap that adopting this technology constitutes is huge and it makes Metro de Lisboa one of the most advanced operators in the world. We’re proud to have been, for twenty years, the technological partner of an operator that’s always advocated incorporating the most cutting-edge systems to provide the highest level of service”.

With this new solution, users only have to swipe their card or cellphone when they enter and leave the station and Indra’s system does the rest, automatically calculating the fare according to the route they’ve taken and sending the actual cost of the trip to the payment gateway, which charges it to their account in a secure, transparent and easy-to-understand manner.

This will supersede the old prepaid model and bring in a much more modern and efficient postpaid one based on Account-Based Ticketing (ABT), which is directly integrated into the financial ecosystem to automate collections.

This will reduce the volume of cash transactions and costs. It’s also a system that anticipates the future, enabling the city to move towards a more intermodal and interoperable kind of mobility, eliminating barriers so that travelers can combine means of transport and get around in a much faster, more convenient and environment-friendly manner.

Indra is one of the world’s leading ticketing companies, with proprietary technology and projects for the subways in Madrid, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Santiago de Chile, Cairo, Egypt, Riyadh and Mumbai, the light rail in St. Louis and the suburban rail in Mexico City, among many others. Its solutions to improve urban mobility and make it more sustainable can already be found in over 100 cities around the world, including London, Amsterdam, Sydney, Madrid, Dublin, Medellín and Manila.

About Indra

Indra (www.indracompany.com) is one of the leading global technology and consulting companies, and a world leader in technological engineering for the aerospace, defence and mobility markets and digital transformation and information technologies in Spain and Latin America through its subsidiary, Minsait. Its business model is based on a comprehensive range of proprietary products, with an end-to-end, high-value approach and a significant innovative component, making it the technological partner for the digitization and key operations of its clients around the world. Sustainability forms part of its strategy and culture in order to overcome current-day and future social and environmental challenges. In the 2022 fiscal year, Indra achieved revenue totaling €3.851 billion, with almost 57,000 employees, a local presence in 46 countries and business operations in over 140 countries.

Communication Contact

María Antonia García | magcarballal@indra.es | M +34 648 10 29 48