People have short memories. It’s easy to forget that MTA ‘Tap and Go’ transit for EMV contactless plastic and digital cards has been up and running since May 2019. Open loop Tap and Go is the way MTA wants people to use their system. Mighty swipe MetroCard is still with us but finally, yes finally, going away by the end of 2025. The MetroCard replacement OMNY card launched in late 2021 after many delays. It’s the world’s first plastic white label EMV card, issued by Mastercard, disguised as a closed loop transit card. At launch time MTA said OMNY mobile app and OMNY card for digital wallets was ‘coming soon’ but ‘coming soon’ never came and all mention of OMNY app was quietly scrubbed from the OMNY site. No word since.
What happened? A likely explanation can be found on Sydney’s OPAL system. Transport for NSW tested a EMV based digital OPAL card on Samsung Pay and Apple Pay starting in 2020 but killed the beta program in mid 2023. As Cubic is the biggest promoter of EMV open loop and manages both MTA and Sydney transit fare systems, I suspect the issue boiled down to EMV card clash.
As FeliCa Dude once explained: “the PSE (Payment System Environment) must embed the correct AID (Application Identifier), but the device cannot determine which EMV PSE to present the PSE selection APDU (Application Protocol Data Unit) <that> is common to all PBOC and EMV cards.” Translation: as all EMV cards have the same basic NFC ID, when you have a digital wallet with multiple EMV cards the device doesn’t know which one to present to the gate reader. That’s one reason why Wallet app has a default payment card setting.
A user can set multiple Express Transit Cards (auto selection) in Apple Wallet settings, but only one card for each native (FeliCa, MIFARE, Calypso, PBOC, etc.) transit card system, and one default EMV card for all Express Transit open loop use. But what happens when both the native digital closed loop transit card is EMV in addition to a regular EMV payment setup for open loop? It’s a NFC auto-selection limitation that Apple’s Enhanced Contactless Polling (ECP) is supposed to take care of even with a Wallet full of different EMV cards. And yet despite the OMNY transit gates being Apple ECP certified, OMNY digital card has yet to appear. To date there isn’t a transit system in the world that has a closed loop EMV card on plastic and digital, even though it’s supposed to work…on paper. Perhaps Apple needs to update ECP (currently at v2.3?) which would mean having to update the entire OMNY transit gate firmware. That would explain the delay.
9to5 Mac reports that MTA app with OMNY integration and digital card is coming to Apple Wallet when MetroCard disappears late this year. While MTA has not made any official announcement, it’s on their 2025 ‘to do’ list. Here’s the thing: MTA wants people to use open loop as much as possible. To that end MTA and CUBIC have put a lot of effort migrating as many closed loop features (like fare capping) as they can to the open loop side because that’s where the fare system investment is. People using their own credit card for transit removes a lot of support costs because MTA can push card support problems on the banks. Issuing and supporting their own OMNY card is a cost nuisance that MTA wants to do away with as much as possible because OMNY is just a fare system, not a transit business platform.
If OMNY digital card really launches this time, it won’t be a direct Wallet add. It will be like Ventra for Apple Wallet: download the transit app, register an account, register a payment card for the account and add OMNY from the app. Adding money to the card will almost certainly be limited to the OMNY app as well, again just like Apple Wallet Ventra.
Last but not least, turning on Express Transit mode for OMNY card will turn off payment card Express Transit. It’s the only sure way to prevent EMV card clash at OMNY transit gates. iOS 19 should be out by then, maybe Apple Wallet will have a few new Express Mode tricks. I doubt it but we’ll find out at WWDC25.
2025-11-12 Update: iOS 26.2 Apple Wallet EMV White-label support
iOS 26.2 beta 2 has a new Apple Wallet feature: support for Conecs Cards. This is a white-label EMV card that routes through CONECS’s private network rather than full Visa/Mastercard rails, but it mirrors EMV Carte Bancaire (CB) for terminal compatibility. Transactions are processed on CB certified POS terminals (e.g., Ingenico, Verifone, etc.) without banking fees. In short this is very similar to the OMNY Card, another white-label EMV scheme for OMNY system transit.
It looks like EMV white-label support is coming to Apple Wallet with iOS 26.2, a feature that would finally support OMNY card in Apple Wallet and the ability to add funds with Apple Pay (if OMNY want to support that, but they might limit the feature to OMNY App).
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