The opening of the rail sector to competition is reshaping the way tickets are sold, journeys are planned, and responsibilities are distributed across stakeholders.

On March 19, Basile Bonnier, our Chief Customer Success Officer, took part in a round table hosted by Ville Rail & Transports on “MaaS Billettique - How to unify territorial initiatives and foster intermodal connectivity?”.

As Public Transport Authorities take greater control over ticket distribution across their territories, the risk of fragmentation for travelers grows. The round table explored how initiatives such as GITE can help unify the system at a national level, while simplifying the journey experience and fostering true intermodal connectivity.

Basile was accompanied by Selma Harri, Development Manager at SNCF Connect & Tech; Solmaz Ranjineh, Lawyer at Cloix Mendes-Gil; Jérôme Kravetz, Director at Nouvelle-Aquitaine Mobilités; Alexandre Anache, Assistant Director at the DGITM; as well as the event's host, Mélanie Veissier, Director of Transport, Mobility and Logistics Projects at Eona-X.

With over 20 years of experience in the rail industry, where he held leading roles at SNCF and its subsidiaries, as well as in the consulting industry, before joining Wiremind, Basile shared his insights on the key elements needed to help unify rail initiatives. Below, we share the key insights from his contributions:

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The complexity behind a simple ticket

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Selling a train ticket sounds simple. In practice, however, it involves orchestrating a web of operators, distribution channels, and business models… and the complexity scales quickly with every additional stakeholder introduced into the system.

At Wiremind, our role is to build the software layers that make this complexity invisible to travelers: pricing, inventory management, distribution, and revenue optimization. The underlying goal is to enable a genuinely seamless, end-to-end journey, one that spans multiple operators and transport modes, aligns timetables, and consolidates ticketing into a single, coherent experience for the traveler, regardless of how many stakeholders are involved for each leg behind the scenes. By doing so, the rail industry can remain competitive with modes of transport that are naturally end-to-end, such as the car, which accompanies the traveler from their door to their final destination without requiring them to think about who operates each leg.

This is the reason why Wiremind developed PAXONE, a modern inventory and distribution platform that integrates sales, inventory, CRM, and revenue management into a single ecosystem, enabling transport operators to manage their commercial operations more efficiently and at scale. PAXONE is also the foundation on which our collaboration with Sopra on GITE is built: a national-scale project commissioned by the French Ministry of Transport, aimed at reducing fragmentation across the French rail distribution ecosystem.

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Building a shared infrastructure: the challenge of multi-stakeholder governance

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One of the core topics is GITE (the Gestionnaire de l'Inventaire, de la Tarification et de l'Exposition des Données), a unified national rail distribution infrastructure developed under a mandate from the French Ministry for Infrastructure, Transport and the Sea (DGITM). In November 2025, Wiremind was selected to design, deliver, and operate this system, powered by PAXONE, our inventory and distribution platform.

GITE represents a fundamental shift in how rail distribution infrastructure is conceived. Rather than each operator running its own siloed system, GITE establishes a unified framework in which multiple stakeholders, who are often competitors, share a single platform, while retaining strict partitioning between them. Each operator maintains full control over its own commercial data and strategy, while benefiting from shared services that would be prohibitively costly to replicate individually.

For distributors, the value is concrete: a unified view of the full offer, with connections and transfers between operators managed within a standardized regulatory framework, the PRR.

What makes this kind of project challenging, however, is not the technology. As Basile noted, the real challenge lies in stakeholder alignment: agreeing on roles, rights and duties, reference data ownership, and governance rules before a single line of code goes into production. Intermodality, in this sense, is not something that can be imposed. It has to be orchestrated, built and secured on solid foundations, open standards, and a governance model that gives every actor clarity on their place in the system.

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One journey, one experience: the traveler's perspective

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From the traveler's perspective, the question of intermodality ultimately comes down to something very practical: when something goes wrong, a disruption, a missed connection, a failed transaction, who do I contact?

In a fragmented distribution landscape, with multiple operators, multiple channels, and multiple regional models coexisting, the risk is that complexity meant to be managed behind the scenes ends up being felt by the traveler. The answer, as Basile framed it, is not to simplify the ecosystem itself but to ensure that the systems built on top of it always have a single, clear point of contact to the end user.

Achieving this requires more than good UX. It requires shared foundations: common standards for data exchange that allow every authority, every operator, and every application to interoperate without imposing that interoperability on the traveler. These standards are a significant part of the solution because they do not erase the diversity of regional and national models, they make that diversity navigable.

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AI and the future of mobility distribution

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The round table also addressed a question the industry can no longer defer: what role will AI play in transforming how mobility is distributed and managed?

Basile's position is that AI is already reshaping the sector. The relevant question is no longer whether it will have an impact, but how to capture its benefits while managing its risks. Those risks are real: bias, and dependency on actors whose priorities are not necessarily aligned with national or territorial objectives. For AI to serve the public interest in mobility, it must be built on transparent, auditable foundations — not treated as a black box trusted to produce the right recommendations.

The value AI brings today is already visible in forecasting and operational decision support via AI agents. Wiremind's solutions, for instance, already enable operators to produce reliable demand forecasts, optimize pricing dynamically, and redesign train schedules based on how travelers actually need them. The next step is tighter integration between inventory systems and AI-driven revenue management systems to improve information flow and make transport services more efficient.

Underpinning all of this is the question of interoperability standards. Frameworks such as OSDM and NeTEx are central to enabling AI-powered mobility ecosystems that work across operators and borders, and Wiremind is actively engaged in building on these foundations.

Want to hear Basile's perspectives in full? Watch the round table videos here, including his take on the traveler experience, the role of AI in transport, and what it really takes to build a unified rail ecosystem.

A big thank you to Ville Rail & Transports for hosting this event and facilitating such rich and forward-looking exchanges.

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