Europe’s leading provider of digital parking services, EasyPark Group and mobile technology company Fortumo this week announced the launch of a direct carrier billing partnership.
EasyPark provides parking services in 13 European countries and will be looking at additional markets beside Scandinavia where carrier billing can be implemented to collect payments from drivers.
With the partnership drivers in Finland, Norway and Sweden can now conveniently charge their parking to their mobile phone bill through Fortumo.
For consumers, paying with carrier billing for parking is very simple. After parking their car, they send a text message to EasyPark with relevant information (car registration number, parking zone, length of parking). EasyPark then facilitates the parking with the local municipality while Fortumo handles the revenue collection and reconciliation from mobile operators.
Users do not need mobile data access, nor do they need to sign up for any additional accounts or enter their credit card information to pay through Fortumo. Instead, the fee is charged to their mobile phone bill which means even those people without a bank account are able to make payments.
In order to provide carrier billing to its users, EasyPark has integrated Fortumo’s powerful Payments API, which gives merchants scalable access to the latest direct carrier billing technologies made available by telcos. Instead of having to integrate and manage dozens of telco partnerships, EasyPark was able to launch in all 3 countries through one integration with Fortumo.
Mauritz Borjeson, EasyPark Group CBDO
With Fortumo, we can offer operator billing in all Nordic markets with only one interface, which allows us to provide customers with greater choice and flexibility when using our service seamlessly across markets.
Andrea Boetti, VP of Global Business Development, Fortumo
Modern carrier billing infrastructure has commercial terms and technical features that bring it on par with card-based payments. This creates new growth opportunities for our telco partners for whom it becomes possible to tap into business beyond the digital economy.