As we begin the second half of 2026, Cal-ITP Benefits is seeing steady growth and broad adoption. In May, we saw the most enrollments in a single month since the product launched. Reduced-fare transactions were up 36% from May to June and will be even higher in July. Agencies in the Ventura region and Santa Cruz Metro are targeting a soft launch in August with a handful of agencies in the pipeline to go live later in the year. While our 453 enrollments and 4,293 reduced-fare transactions year-to-date put us slightly behind our mid-year targets for reaching 1000 enrollments and 10,000 reduced-fare transactions in 2026, our current growth trends point to us exceeding these goals. It's edifying to see more transit riders in California use Cal-ITP Benefits to take advantage of their transit benefits.
Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority will onboard to Cal-ITP Benefits. PSTA, based in St.Petersburg, Florida, implemented open-loop payments on their system in February 2023 as a new option for riders to pay their fare. Like all agencies offering this new fare collection technology, they need a way for riders entitled to a transit benefit to share in the convenience of this new way to pay. After learning about Cal-ITP Benefits at a conference several years ago, they have worked diligently to leverage our solution. That diligence finally paid off when contracting to implement this solution was complete in June.
This project—which formally kicked off in July—is exciting for a couple of reasons.
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While we've always envisioned our product as a national solution to the challenge of delivering transit benefits as part of an open-loop payments implementation, PSTA is the first transit operator outside of California to onboard to our product.
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Secondly, Cal-ITP Benefits will add support for bank card registration with INIT, the vendor that handles fare processing for PSTA. INIT is one of four vendors offering a fare processing solution on the Cal-ITP MSAs. California agencies in the pipeline to implement open-loop payments can now choose Enghouse, INIT, or Littlepay as their fare processor and have immediate access to Cal-ITP Benefits. Moreover, any California agency that currently uses INIT for fare processing has the option to adopt Cal-ITP Benefits as their fare discount solution for open-loop payments. We're targeting early 2027 as a go-live for PSTA. This integration will be broadly available to any agency using INIT at that time.
California agencies currently contracted with INIT, please reach out to us at hello@calitp.org if you're interested in Cal-ITP Benefits. We'd love to have you.
Cheers!
Andy
Product Lead, Cal-ITP Benefits
andy@compiler.la
