Headlines:
Growth in Parking Meters Paid by Card KeyCorp Using Panini Check Scanners Dutch ING Unit Selects Sun Microsystems
Growth in Parking Meters Paid by Card
A hundred and fifty Las Vegas parking spots are now cashless, according to Peppercoin Inc., which makes aggregation software allowing a variety of small-value payments to be processed as a single card transaction.
Fifteen meters, manufactured by Reino Parking Systems Inc. of Alameda, Calif., were switched on Wednesday, replacing coin-operated meters, Peppercoin said in a press release issued Wednesday. The system connects to both a cell phone and a credit card account.
Peppercoin said a similar system went live in Oklahoma City last week and that Yonkers, N.Y., is scheduled to begin using a set of cashless Reino meters this month.
Motorists who have enrolled to use the meters can pay by calling a number on their cell phones and entering the meter number and how long they want to park. When the time is about to expire, the system sends a text message, giving the user an opportunity to extend the parking time.
The charges are made directly to the credit card and do not appear on the phone bill. Mark Ralston, Reino's executive vice president of operations, said at a conference in October that it can be a hassle to get favorable terms from phone companies in order to put new charges on a cell phone bill. "They treat their bill as a holy entity," he said.
In June, Mark Siegel, a spokesman for Cingular Wireless LLC, told American Banker that his company often gets proposals to put extra charges on its customers' bills. "The first question we ask is, 'Is this something our customers will want? And oh, by the way, will we make money on it?' " he said.
Companies must satisfy both conditions if Cingular is to consider adding their charges to its bills. Cingular is a joint venture of BellSouth Corp. and SBC Communications Inc.
If the charges were to appear on a phone bill, they would naturally be aggregated along with the regular phone charges, which would then be processed as a single payment at the end of the month.
Since that has not happened, and since merchants have complained that card interchange fees consume too much of small-value payments, Reino uses software from Peppercoin, of Waltham, Mass., to aggregate multiple parking charges into one card transaction.
Reino is not the only payment vendor pursuing the parking-meter market. Coral Gables, Fla., has a similar setup that uses a system from the Toronto payment company Mint Inc.
Like Reino, Mint uses cell phones to initiate payments but puts the charges directly on the user's credit card statement.
Unlike Reino, the Mint system does not use special meters; municipalities that use it simply apply a sticker to existing meters to alert motorists that they can pay for parking with a phone call. Thus, Coral Gables was able to use it with all 4,573 of its meters. The payment information does not show up on the meters; it appears on a handheld device that is used by parking enforcement officers.
KeyCorp Using Panini Check Scanners
Panini North America announced Wednesday that KeyCorp of Cleveland is providing its check scanners for use by remote-capture customers of KeyBank's global treasury management group.
The Panini My Vision X check scanner reads the check's magnetic ink character-recognition line and captures a digital image of the front and back of the check.
Key has 13 clients using its remote deposit application, called Key Capture, Panini said in a press release.
Key Capture is powered by software from Alogent Corp. of Atlanta.
Dutch ING Unit Selects Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems Inc. announced that ING Group NV's Postbank unit has begun using an Internet banking infrastructure developed by Sun.
Sun, of Santa Clara, Calif., said its N1 Service Provisioning System is designed to be flexible to accommodate growth.
>Erik Dralans, ING's worldwide head of operations and Internet banking, said in a Sun press release issued Tuesday, "Any changes we make to our banking service subsequently will not lead to service degradation for the end user."
Postbank like its parent, is based in Amsterdam. The unit has more than 7 million customers, and more than 1.5 million of them bank online.
