Parking Meters: A Gift Card to Promote M-payments
- Two years ago, VINCI Park and PayByPhone started an initiative based on contactless mobile payment applied to car parking at Issy-les-Moulineaux. From now on, merchants can offer parking time to their customers.
- VINCI Park is now partnering with merchants associations from Issy-les-Moulineaux to give out 5,000 1 euro cards to be used for mobile or online payment through PayByPhone’s platform.
- This gift card includes an OTP to be linked by the driver to his PayByPhone profile: he is then credited one euro for his next parking time: this offer also applies to new users.
- Parking meters and municipality-delivered cards are still particularly used, but mobile payment is increasingly present and witnesses strong development in several big towns (such as New York, for instance). Customers’ satisfaction with these solutions seems to account for larger scale deployments.
- PayByPhone also explains it has managed to federate over 3.5 million users worldwide. Distant payment of car parking time through PayByPhone appears to have attracted 100,000 people from August to October 2011 and could represent 2 million transactions in equipped towns. The player also recently announced it has been selected by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency for large scale deployment: 30,800 parking places will be equipped with contactless stickers, to be added to the already proposed traditional payment features. In France, initiatives related to car parking, bike rental, transportation tickets and car sharing are being conducted in Issy-les-Moulineaux, Nice, Vannes and Calais.
- To some extent, the proposed cards could democratise mobile payment and help partner merchants secure the loyalty of their customers.