Passport introduces an open parking ecosystem to enable digital parking payments from multiple providers
Passport envisions a world where paying to park isn’t its own experience, but instead a part of every experience. Today, most cities have an exclusive parking app, which provides a digital option for parkers but limits consumer choice. Passport is opening up the world of parking payments so cities, universities and other operators can support any number of apps and user experiences — not just traditional parking apps.
This week, we announced a $65 million Series D round of funding. The new capital will primarily be used to further invest in our mobility platform, which will enable cities to manage a complex mobility ecosystem from a single hub. Passport helps to remove the complexity of transportation payments and makes it easy to manage any number of parking payment providers.
Expanding the parking payments ecosystem
In the coming months, we’ll be onboarding and announcing partners who are leveraging our APIs to facilitate parking payments. Our goal is to help cities simplify the parking experience, bringing payments into apps users already have on hand while providing industry-leading management and reporting tools on the backend. With our standardized mobility platform, adding a new payment provider is simple and requires no additional operational overhead.
As we expand the ecosystem, cities will be able to offer parking payments through a number of apps and experiences:
- Mapping and wayfinding services: More than 75% of smartphone owners regularly use a mapping app to navigate to their destination, which often ends with parking a car in an on-street or off-street parking spot. Passport can integrate with these services to enable parking payments directly in a wayfinding app.
- In-car payments: With the rise of connected and autonomous vehicles, in-car payments are the next big thing in the automotive industry. With Passport’s APIs, OEMs can natively integrate parking payments into connected cars.
- Lifestyle apps: Passport wants parking to be the simplest part of a person’s day. By leveraging our APIs, users can pay to park through an app where they order their morning coffee or sign-up for a fitness class.
- Parking apps: User-centric parking payment apps such as PayByPhone can be enabled through Passport’s platform to give more choice to users. PayByPhone is currently integrating into our platform in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Unlock new possibilities for cities
With a standardized platform like Passport, cities can open up their parking ecosystem and make an immediate impact on their mobility operations.
- Improve customer convenience: More consumer choice and more convenient ways to pay for parking leads to an improved customer experience, facilitated by the city.
- Increase payment compliance: By enabling more ways to pay digitally and giving consumers greater choice, cities can move toward 100% digital payment compliance.
- Reduce reliance on hardware: Parking meters and pay stations require a large capital investment and ongoing maintenance costs. With an asset-light digital environment, cities can realize significant cost savings.
- Create opportunities for innovation: With a single source of truth for rules, rates and restrictions for accessing a city’s curb, it is easy to add multiple ways to pay for parking not just in traditional parking apps, but in other popular apps or in-car systems.
One platform. Endless possibilities.
An open ecosystem is one part of the solution for creating an easy-to-manage, efficient mobility operation for the future. Public APIs allow any internet-connected technology to accept parking payments with ease — no additional configuration, signage changes, reconciliation challenges, enforcement integrations, or other operational burdens for the operator.
Passport’s mobility management platform enables cities to:
- Manage rules and rates for the curb in a central hub
- Rely less on specific point solutions like hardware or individual parking apps
- Digitalize parking and facilitate payments at scale
- Easily enable new technologies on demand
- Provide a frictionless experience for transacting with transportation services
- View real-time, ecosystem-wide activity and reports
- Standardize payments flow to ensure control of your funds
This announcement represents a major shift in the parking industry; Passport believes that the age of one-size-fits-all applications is coming to an end. We are dedicated to helping our customers simplify and improve transportation by creating a rich ecosystem where users have myriad options for parking payments.
To learn more, visit our website or download a guide on procuring for a mobility management platform.
