Yekaterinburg residents and guests will be able to pay their fare on ground transport with bank cards, or alternatively, using a mobile app. So far, it’s available only on the metro.
It is yet unclear if it will work across all city routes or some selected ones that will be frequently used by FIFA guests. This will be decided later, Pavel Vedernikov, head of OJSC I-Set (the company that maintains the so-called "E-card") told Russian media.
The cards that one will be accepted are MasterCard (PayPass), VISA (Pay Wave) and Russia’s MIR card featuring a non-contact antenna. “To make a payment you will need to press the card to the validator,” he noted. To this end, the old validators will be reprogrammed, he said.
The 2018 FIFA World Cup is due to kick off on June 14, 2018. A total of 11 Russian cities will host the championship – Moscow, Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, Volgograd, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Saransk, Rostov-on-Don, Sochi and Yekaterinburg.
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