We have some great news for Wellington. From today you can use your Snapper to pay for parking on all on-street parking meters operated by Wellington City Council.
This product started with a simple idea – how could we remove the pain of paying for parking? We all know that parking is painful and the payment seemed to be a critical part of it. People rarely carry cash and the other alternatives to cash were just as cumbersome. We wanted to develop a product that could be easily used anywhere by anyone.
When we pitched this idea to Wellington City Council in late 2011, they were supportive right from the start. The Council has a vision of a Smart Capital – a city that is people centered and dynamic. Snapper Parking is all about providing a way to pay for parking that is designed around people and makes the city more dynamic by removing the friction of payment. We think this sets Wellington apart from other cities in Australasia and its another step towards achieving the City’s vision. We’re proud that we can contribute to that.
Snapper Parking is the result of years of work with our technology partners ITSL, who provide all of the on-street meters, and Payment Express, who have developed the Snapper reader that is now installed on these machines. These are two great kiwi companies and we’re proud of the payment experience we’ve been able to design with them.
We’ve designed an experience together that is intuitive and builds on what customers already know. It starts with the branding that reassures customers that they can pay easily at the meter and also sets the expectation of a great experience that lets you get on with your day.
The payment mechanism is pure Snapper – simple, contactless and frictionless. We’ve also built in some extra features such as a balance check before you select how long you want to park. That has let us add some logic to set the maximum time you can park in line with the balance on your card. These are all areas where we’ve been able to remove friction from the payment experience.
As part of the project we’ve worked very closely with Payment Express to ensure that any customer with a Snapper can use Snapper Parking. Every single Snapper – including the latest Touch2Pay phones from 2degrees – can use Snapper Parking.
We really think this is an opportunity to move away from cash which is expensive, dirty and inconvenient. To do that we needed to make Snapper Parking a great value proposition. In addition to the ease of use, we are pleased we can offer Snapper Parking for a transaction fee of only 25 cents – that’s half the price of alternatives to cash. We think that this combination will lower the barriers to usage and it allows us to invest in the deployment of the product