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Our Focus

Integrated Fare Collection Servives (Pty)Ltd (IFCS) a member of the Digicore Group provide turnkey solutions and products to the transport industry in South Africa around specifically the development, implementation and operation of Electronic Fare Collection and Integrated Vehicle Tracking & Monitoring solutions. Our solutions and products are provided under the TAP-I-FARE™ brand.

We are currently actively involved with the Taxi Industry of the North West province of South Africa in implementing the first full EMV (Europay MasterCard Visa) compliant contactless payment system for South Africa.

IFCS together with its solution providers adheres to all NDOT (National Department of Transport), PASA (Payment Association of South Africa), FICA (Financial Intelligence Centre Act) and MasterCard requirements regarding Prepaid contactless payments.

In particular our solution was developed and adhere to:

  • the Guidelines as published for commentary in the Government Gazette no: 31491 Dated 7 October 2006 that deals specifically with the "REQUIREMENTS FOR THE IMPLEMENTATION OF ELECTRONIC FARE COLLECTION SYSTEMS IN PUBLIC TRANSPORT" and;

  • Exemption 454 promulgated on 28 May 2010 in the Gevernment Gazette that deals specifically with Prepaid Instruments like Chip Cards that can be used as payment instruments in transport and retail applications.
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Background

In 2001 the government issued two related tenders involving the taxi industry: One for the Recapitalisation (Recap) of new taxi vehicles and one for an Electronic Management System (EMS) to replace cash fare payments in the taxi industry with chip card payments, as well as more effective safety control of taxi vehicles through vehicle tracking and monitoring.

For a number of reasons the Government decided in 2005 to cancel both these tenders and give the two issues back to the taxi industry for implementation.

The taxi industry in the different provinces soon started implementing the recap process. However, as far as the EMS was concerned, nothing happened for about two years. At the end of 2006 one province took the lead and approached one of the persons involved in the original EMS tender to develop and implement an EMS for the taxi industry.

A further important development came in 2007 when the National Department of Transport (NDOT) published new regulations for commentary to the effect that Electronic Fare Collection in the transport must be interoperable and intermodal. In short one card for bus, train and taxi and to be used anywhere on any system. In order to accomplish this it was specified that the country would move away from traditional propriety transport fare payment systems with a smart card (so called Mifare systems) to a system which will ensure interoperability and intermodality through the National Payment System. This implies that the chip card must be issued by a bank, the so called “float” must be controlled by a bank and the card must be Europay, MasterCard and Visa (EMV) compliant.

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