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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Cheers!
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Andy
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Product Lead, Cal-ITP Benefits
andy@compiler.la
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