The Department of Finance for the city is looking to take advantage of the ubiquity of smartphones.
The Department of Finance of New York City is now seeking to develop a mobile payments option to help to boost collections on the tickets that are issued for traffic camera and parking violations.
This could prove to be a large and successful venture, considering that enforcement agents issue 8-10 million tickets per year.
The Department of Finance (DOF) is exploring options for mobile payments for tickets for parking and traffic light violations that would give drivers the ability to use anything from debit and credit cards to Apple Pay, PayPal, or even Bitcoin based transactions. This effort is in response to a request made by the city to obtain information for the development of a system that would accelerate the process of collecting from parking tickets, which brings in approximately $600 million per year.
Using mobile payments was one of the technology channels that appears the most promising to the DOF.
The brief from the department explained that “After an internal review of DOF’s current payment channels and of recent developments in contemporary payment technologies.” It also went on to say that the department feels that emerging tech could offer a way for drivers to quickly and conveniently pay their parking tickets by way of smartphone, tablet, or other forms of mobile devices.
At the moment, the parking tickets that are issued by traffic enforcement agents and NYPD officers can be processed online, through the mail, or in person. The NYC.gov online payment site is not currently mobile optimized, and using it comes with a convenience fee of 2.49 percent.
The proposal from the Department of Finance would develop a mobile payments based system that would provide a single click option. Using that tech, the tickets could be scanned or photographed in a way to be able to process it while also taking “advantage of new technologies and extended public access to government.” It will simply make it easier and faster for the recipients of these tickets to get paying them over with.
