As mobile parking payments increase, there is an opportunity to increase digital payment adoption beyond traditional parking apps. Cities with Passport Payments can leverage an open parking ecosystem allowing providers, such as mapping service apps, connected vehicles or lifestyle apps, to leverage Passport’s parking rate engine via APIs to add parking payments into their app.

Parking payments are small ticket transactions, yet cities often face standard interchange rates which can average 8% - 10% in card processing fees alone on a $3.00 transaction. Passport, a small payments expert, has built its business around these types of transactions and has negotiated special credit & debit card rates. We often can shave 2% - 4% off a city’s card processing fees.

Cities often enter into contracts with banks or merchant processors for city-wide card processing services. These one-size-fits-all processors cost financial managers hours each week in reconciling processing data with back office systems. Integrated payment solutions, like Passport Payments, automate reconciliation processes by connecting parking activity with merchant processing data in a single back office dashboard. This decreases the time spent reconciling while simplifying the management and collection of funds.

Many cities want to give parkers the option to extend parking sessions. This, however, can mean paying a merchant processing transaction fee not once, but twice. Passport is committed to a clean rate structure and assessing the merchant processing transaction fee one time per each settled transaction, even an extended parking session. This can save cities up to 20% in merchant processing transaction fees.