PayByPhone
Introducing the Next-Gen of Parking Payment

Imagine yourself driving in rush-hour traffic in a city like Seattle or Central London, and you are on your way to meet an important client. Once you reach the destination, it is not all over yet; finding a suitable parking spot and a parking meter can be even more cumbersome at times. But, one company, PayByPhone decided to disrupt this tiresome cycle through an online parking payment application, which provides the benefits of extending parking time, remote payment, and built in maps.

The following conversation with Roamy Valera, CEO, U.S. and Canada, and Andreas Gruber, president and global CEO of PayByPhone offers detailed insights into the company along with the features and functionalities of the application.
Please elaborate on the market challenges and how PayByPhone tackles it.

Gruber: When it comes to parking, people often face trouble finding an open spot, a parking meter, and then go back and forth for extending the parking time and avoiding a ticket. To put a stop to these time-consuming parking hassles, we built the PayByPhone application to be consumer-centric, intuitive, and easy-to-use for smartphone users. PayByPhone allows them to streamline cashless transactions from anywhere at any time. Users no longer have to worry about extending their parking time or continuously checking the time to determine the end of parking time as this application comes with instant notifications and top-up options.

What are the features that users can take advantage of when they use PayByPhone?

Valera: We are wholly owned and supported by Volkswagen Financial Services AG that operates luxury automobile brands including VW, Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini, and Ducati.

Our focus at the moment is on helping cities increase revenue, reduce cost, and streamline their parking operations through continuous innovations. The application is designed to minimize payment friction that exists in cashless parking solutions. We offer users flexible choices depending on their requirement and the phone’s compatibility. For instance, consumers without access to smartphones can dial an 800-number to avail the parking payment services. Meanwhile, smartphone users have the option to register with PayByPhone without downloading the application, or they can download the application and not have to go through with the registration process. The flexibility of our parking payment service has put us far ahead in the cashless parking payment industry. Due to this, we are witnessing a 60 to 92 percent adoption rate of our technology in major cities around the world including Seattle, Miami, Paris, and Central London.

Gruber: Our application has built in features such as map-based parking, which provides drivers with an automatically generated list of nearby parking areas for a seamless experience. Moreover, the application gives the user the unique ability to store the information of multiple vehicles and pay for their parking from a remote location at any time. Through the PayByPhone corporate account, we have extended this feature for large fleet operators such as delivery agencies that operate multiple vehicles. It enables the account holder to manage parking sessions and payment from a single interface.

As users add a number of cars to their profiles—be it for business purpose or personal use—our application enables them to personalize their profiles with the driver’s contact details, credit card permission, dashboard reporting, e-mail address for receipt notification, and occupation. The reporting feature essentially gives the asset owner an opportunity to view information associated with parking a vehicle. All these features are available in multiple languages such as French, Spanish, and Mandarin. In addition to that, we have been a leader in the security front and are compliant with the payment card industry (PCI) standard while maintaining various payment channels.

To highlight the proficiency of your application, please share a case scenario.

Valera: A few years back, the City of Miami was in search of a solution to regulate the parking payment in a popular arts and restaurant district. In pursuit of eliminating the capital costs involved in deploying hardware such as parking meters, they wanted an easy-to-use alternative. On partnering with us, the client was able to deploy the application in over 1,000 parking lots around the city and create an asset-right solution.

How has PayByPhone’s success been so far and what lies ahead for the company?

Gruber: With over 20 million registered users, we process close to $400 million of parking transactions per year. We have been experiencing a growth rate of three million new users and a 36 percent increase in app downloads year after year. To steer this success ahead, we are developing a data system for the “pay from the app” feature and will be enhancing our maps to show available parking spaces. Currently, we are collaborating with 12 world-class vehicular industries to shape the future of mobility.