SINGAPORE: It will soon be more convenient for you to pay for your transactions using your CEPAS stored value cards. The Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) and five companies from the industry are spending S$16 million to increase the number of point-of-sales terminals for using these cards. The ai is to increase these terminals from the current 5,000 to 24,000 by 2011.

The five companies involved in the Call-for Collaboration with IDA are EZ-Link Pte Ltd, Nera Telecommunications Ltd, Network for Electronic Transfers (NETS) Singapore, PaymentLink Pte Ltd and Way Systems Solutions Pte Ltd...More

 CEPAS is an acronym for 'Contactless E-purse  Application Standard'

 The most recent version of the standard is CEPAS  2.0. The standard will enable the interoperability of multi-purpose stored value (MPSV) card payment schemes from different card issuers and system operators such as EZ-Link and NETS.

 The following cards comply with this standard:

 - EZ-Link Adult

 - TransitLink Concession

 - NETS FlashPay

Now that you know about the basic concept of CEPAS. We would like to present to you our very own miniature CEPAS reader!

We will be integrating these card readers into vending machines to enable these machines to accept cashless means of payment. We will also be introducing these card readers to hawker centre vendors!