Reliable routes to connected parking payments

Payment reliability is becoming the critical issue in parking infrastructure, says Matthew Thomas of TNS Payments Market

Parking sits at an unusual intersection of urban infrastructure, local authority policy and retail technology. For drivers, however, the experience is far simpler: find a space, pay quickly and leave the vehicle. 

When that payment step fails, the entire system breaks down.

The physical act of leaving a vehicle and paying for the privilege has been radically transformed over the past decade, with apps, sensors, automatic number plate recognition and contactless terminals beginning to displace the coin-fed meter. 

Yet for all this innovation, one fundamental problem persists: payments still fail. When they do, there is no checkout assistant to intervene, no customer service desk to visit and no second chance. The driver will often abandon the transaction and possibly avoid using the car park again.

Recent research from Transaction Network Services (TNS) across three markets, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, is instructive for anyone responsible for parking payment infrastructure. Its message deserves to sit at the heart of any payment technology procurement decision: reliability is the foundation.

A fragmented payments landscape and its consequences

Across the three markets surveyed, 30% of consumers reported being unable to park their vehicle because of problems with making the payment in the preceding 12 months. That figure alone should give pause. In an era of contactless payments and digital wallets, nearly half of all consumers are encountering friction at the point of payment.

The picture is not uniform. Australia recorded the lowest rate of payment failure at 19%, compared with 46% in the UK and 27% in the US.

The explanation for Australia's relative resilience is informative. In Australia, most of the cashless parking infrastructure in major cities is highly consolidated, meaning the underlying systems are largely consistent, well maintained and operating under unified standards. The UK, however, presents a mixture of private operators, local authority systems, third-party apps and legacy terminal hardware – all operating with varying degrees of interoperability.

That fragmentation does not merely complicate the driver's experience but can impact payment reliability.

This comparison carries a practical implication. When infrastructure is consolidated and standards are applied consistently, reliability largely improves. When it is fragmented across operators, technologies and connectivity solutions, failures multiply. The Australian experience is not a fluke. It is the outcome of a more cohesive approach to payments infrastructure and suggests a direction of travel for markets that have yet to achieve that coherence. 

Is age just a number? The demographics of digital payment failure

One of the more counterintuitive findings in the research concerns the relationship between age and payment problems.

Among 18 to 24-year-olds, 50.6% reported experiencing a parking payment failure in the past 12 months. For those aged 25 to 34, the figure was 47.2%. By contrast, only 11.2% of drivers aged 55 and over reported the same problem. The failure rate falls almost continuously across each age cohort as it advances.

The most plausible explanation is behavioural. Younger drivers appear to rely more heavily on app-based parking payments and often use them as their primary or only payment method. Parking apps have proliferated rapidly, but not all are built on payment infrastructure that meets the same standards of reliability as physical terminals connected to mature card processing networks. When an app fails, whether through poor connectivity, timeouts or an underlying processing error, the driver may be left with no fallback.

Older drivers, likely more accustomed to paying at a physical terminal with a card, may actually benefit from the comparative robustness of established card payment infrastructure. That does not mean innovation is misguided. It means innovation needs to be held to the same reliability standards as the mature systems it is existing alongside. A parking app that fails when a driver is pressed for time is worse than no app at all. 

What good looks like and how to get there

What does a high-performing parking payment ecosystem look like to consumers? The research offers several anchors. Simplicity consistently ranks among the top priorities for consumers across all three markets. When asked about their biggest frustrations with payment processes, 33% cited being forced to create an account before completing a transaction, 22% pointed to too many steps in the payment journey, and 21% raised the absence of their preferred payment method. The two largest frustrations point to the same underlying issue – unnecessary friction being imposed on the customer when speed and ease are paramount.

For parking operators, this translates directly into design principles. Payment journeys should require the minimum number of interactions necessary to complete a transaction. Guest checkout should always be available and multiple payment methods, including contactless card, mobile wallet, app and, where feasible, cash, should be supported.

Underpinning all of this is the question of connectivity. Payment terminals in car parks are unattended by definition. When connectivity fails, there is no member of staff to override the system or direct drivers to an alternative. Resilient infrastructure, with multiple redundant connections and SIM-based failover built in, should therefore be a baseline requirement.

For transaction routing, which often leads to the managing of multiple PSP contracts and complex integrations, one emerging solution is payment orchestration. By intelligently routing each transaction through the most appropriate processing pathway in real time and eliminating the need to manage multiple PSP relationships, orchestration reduces the likelihood of failure without adding any visible complexity for the customer. It also allows operators to accommodate a wider range of payment methods without maintaining separate integrations for each. 

Lessons worth exporting

It would be tempting to read the Australian data and conclude that the UK simply needs to consolidate its parking payments market under fewer providers. The structural realities of UK local authority procurement and operator diversity make that a slow and complicated journey.

However, the underlying lesson is more exportable than the specific market structure. Australia's stronger performance reflects a more unified approach to infrastructure standards and a higher bar for reliability before new technology is rolled out at scale. The principle that innovation must earn its place by being at least as reliable as what it replaces is something any operator or local authority can adopt regardless of market structure.

The parking sector in the UK is rightly embracing new payment technology. App-based payments, contactless terminals and integrated mobility platforms all represent genuine improvements in customer experience when they work. The challenge is supporting the infrastructure underpinning these innovations to be robust enough to deliver on its promise.

Matthew Thomas is managing director, UK and Ireland, TNS Payments Market

TNS is a global provider of secure payment and network solutions. As a provider of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions with more than 30 years’ experience, TNS has been offering managed service solutions to more than 1,400 organisations in over 50 countries. TNS’ portfolio spans from unattended and in-store payment terminals, online solutions to secure global network connectivity and payment processing through its cloud native payment orchestration platform.