The STA certification program consists of a Group of Certification Bodies bringing together Certification Bodies authorised to certify compliance of transportation and acceptance media with the CEN technical specification TS 16794 about contactless communication. The STA Group of Certification Bodies works as a platform to ease mutual recognition between the member certification bodies (and the testing laboratories for product testing) and to limit the costs of those agreements. The main principles of the STA certification programme are the following:

• a Group of Certification Bodies (GCB) gathers Certification Bodies (CB) authorised to certify compliance with
  CEN/TS 16794

• Membership of GCB is open to CBs accredited according to ISO/IEC 17065 against CEN/TS 16794

• Certificates delivered by an ISO/IEC 17065 accredited CB are recognised throughout the EU

Code of Conduct

Certification Bodies will follow this document in their dealings with Vendors who wish to avail themselves of STA certification.

STA considers it is essential that public authorities and users can be confident in the quality of contactless communication between contactless readers and fare media. Certification is the appropriate means to create trust. Here you will find a short overview of the certification including an explanation of the abbreviations.

The list of Public Transport Products certified according to the STA certification programme - Proximity Integrated Circuit Cards as well as others - can be consulted on the CNA/PayCert website. A list of certified Proximity Integrated Circuit Card (PICC) can be found here.

This document is the current applicable 2.3 version and contains the Implementation Conformance Statement (ICS) for PT Readers being submitted for STA Contactless Interface Certification for Public Transport Products and is intended for Vendors submitting a PT reader for certification.

This document is the current applicable 2.2 version and aims to define the process for validating the Test Tools of Applicant Laboratories part of the Smart Ticketing Alliance Certification program for contactless communication between fare media and ticketing equipment.

The documents version 3.0 will be in use once the STA certification program 3.0 will be operational.

The launch date for the version 3.0 of the STA certification program is expected during first half of 2023 and will be communicated later.

Working group certification

The objective of the working group is to establish a common approach to conformity certification and the technical equivalence of certification carried out by the group members. The members will work collectively to achieve these aims but remain independent certification bodies being responsible for their own decisions and for the control of their different certification marks.