Creating a More Seamless Parking Payment Experience with TNS
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Parking payments are becoming increasingly connected, digital and complex. As operators modernize legacy environments, introduce new payment methods and connect more customer touchpoints, they also need to maintain reliability, security and a seamless experience for drivers.
In this edition of In the Spotlight, Parking Network speaks with Esther Kinloch, Product Manager at TNS, about the changing world of parking payments, the challenges facing operators and PARCS providers, and how TNS is approaching areas such as payment orchestration, AI, connectivity and the development of more integrated parking experiences.
Q: Could you give us a brief introduction to the company and tell us a little about your role within the organization?
Esther Kinloch:
Absolutely. So a little bit about the company. TNS is a global provider of payment connectivity and managed services, and we help parking operators and PARCS providers simplify very complex payment ecosystems.
So, we know that across the parking industry, TNS supports payment operations for more than 1,100 live parking sites globally. We help operators deliver secure, resilient and seamless parking experiences.
My role focuses on product innovation and partnerships with our customers, PARCS providers and other integrators, helping parking businesses modernize payment and parking infrastructure, and also really focused on improving customer experiences and future-proofing operations as well.
To that end, TNS works closely with both parking operators and PARCS partners to help them deploy solutions faster, and really try and reduce operational complexity and create new revenue opportunities as well for all of our partners.
Our overall goal is very simple: we just want to make payments essentially invisible, reliable and easy, while allowing operators to focus on just running successful parking operations.
Q: Would you say simplifying that complexity is one of the main challenges TNS is helping the industry solve today?
Esther Kinloch:
Absolutely. It is a really big part of what we do.
We know that parking operators are under pressure to modernize legacy payment environments, and they need to do that while maintaining uptime and operations and keep the customers coming and going and avoiding disruption.
We also know that these operators are still managing fragmented environments across entry and exit gates, pay stations, environments across entry and exit gates, pay stations, websites, apps, back-office systems, billing and invoicing. All of these different bits and pieces create significant complexity and higher operating costs. With that simplification that we are trying to offer, we want to really try and reduce those problems for operators.
We also know that consumer expectations have also changed dramatically. We got drivers that expect the same frictionless payment experience in parking that they can currently get in retail and e-commerce space. So, we want to try and support that.
On the PARCS provider side, they got this increasing pressure to support more payment methods and additional integrations and huge amount of security requirements. They also have to deal with lengthy certification projects. So again, kind of coming back to us doing this, simplifying those things for our partners as much as possible.
Q: Can you take us through the products and offerings TNS is bringing to the market to address them?
Esther Kinloch:
Our strategy is built around connecting parking payment touchpoints through a single managed platform.
Just to be clear about it, we are a parking payment specialist. We are not payment providers trying to insert our way into the parking space. We have a long history of providing parking solutions as standalone services. Now, we are trying to offer those services with a more integrated and value-added offering across the entire TNS portfolio.
So to that end, we were across TNSPay Unattended, so our terminal space, TNSPay Orchestration to our payment gateway capabilities, and then our parking TNSPark solutions, which are our online acceptance products as well.
All of those things combined together in an offering, and also considering our connectivity on the other side of things, we have a strong offering to provide, to simplify, bring all these fragmented things together into a single solution for the PARCS operators and the parking operators, as well.
Q: Where are you focusing innovation to address the industry's future needs?
Esther Kinloch:
We have been doing in the innovation space is increasing security and resilience across parking payments. We are moving forward with cloud-native and API-first technology that is for scalability and to ensure that integrations are fast and easy to do.
Importantly, we have been working with AI, embedding across the payment orchestration space and reservations. We already have agents working in the management space for orchestration, providing crucial insights, and there is a pilot underway across the booking journey for reservation to get end user insights as well.
That is for a richer experience for our customers and then a simple experience for our operators as well.
Another thing, we are very excited about modernizing our reservation platform. We are fundamentally changing the upgrade, release and feature implementation process to focus on reducing cost and effort reduction from the customer perspective.
We want to drive innovation to bring features to market even faster across the board.
Q: What are some key trends you see shaping the future of parking payments and the wider parking experience?
Esther Kinloch:
So where we see kind of the market evolving, it's across five main points.
Omnichannel parking experience. We know that the customers are increasingly moving between online reservations, apps and then wireless environments and being physically on-site. So we need to bring those systems together.
API-first ecosystem. Open integrations are replacing those tightly connected legacy systems as well. We have a lot of flexibility in that space.
This huge payment choice capabilities. So consumers want local card schemes, mobile wallets and alternative payment options cloud based orchestration. So everything is moving to the cloud. The intelligence is in that space.
And then that trend to AI as well. It is going to become increasingly important as everyday parking customers move closer to that agentic AI experience for parking selection and payment.
Q: Looking a little further ahead, where does TNS go from here?
Esther Kinloch:
We are continuing to invest in creating a truly connected e-commerce parking ecosystem that brings together payment acceptance or orchestration, reservations, memberships and mobile experiences into a single platform.
We are going to continue expanding our integrations with the PARCS providers to make those deployments easier, accelerate time to market, as well as investing in broader integrations for value-added services across the board.
We want to keep focusing on helping customers move from simply accepting payments to intelligently managing the entire parking payment journey.
You can expect continued innovation around orchestration and automation, the digital customer experience, alternative payment methods, ongoing cloud-based management tools, and again AI-assisted insights and operational visibility in that space.
Ultimately, our vision is to help parking operators and PARCS providers deliver a frictionless parking experience while building more resilient, scalable and future-ready businesses.
About TNS
TNS is a global leader in providing full-stack, modern and secure payment and network solutions. As a leading 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 organizations in over 50 countries. TNS’ comprehensive portfolio spans from cutting-edge unattended and in-store payment terminals, online solutions to secure global network connectivity and seamless payment processing through its cloud native payment orchestration platform. With TNS’ portfolio of industry leading services, customers can reduce the complexities of fragmented payments and connectivity with just one trusted managed service partner.
For more information, please visit: tnsi.com.
About Parking Network
Parking Network is the leading information source for parking. We connect professionals through our online and offline channels. On our online platform parking.net, we publish the latest news, product showcases, job openings, and tenders related to parking. On our platform, you can access the most complete industry and parking professionals directory. Offline, we host niche-specific networking events such as the Airport Parking Network Event.
