VW to buy mobile payments company PayByPhone, which allows people to pay for parking by apps, calls, or texts, and handles $300M in transactions annually
John D. Stoll / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
VW has spent 2016 assembling a mobility portfolio beyond car sales: in May it put $300M into Uber rival Gett as part of a ride-sharing partnership, and now it is buying PayByPhone outright — a company already processing roughly $300M a year in parking payments via apps, calls, and texts.
The deal follows a template set by device makers: Samsung bought Apple Pay competitor LoopPay in 2015 (reportedly around $250M) to own its payments stack, while Apple Pay itself was pushing into paid parking as a self-serve use case. An automaker now making the same kind of acquisition signals that parking is where vehicle owners and payment rails first intersect.
First-order effects
- PayByPhone's parking-payment platform moves under VW ownership, giving the automaker a direct transaction relationship with drivers at the curb rather than through third-party processors.
Second-order effects
- Other automakers building ride-sharing and on-demand services — the space VW entered with Gett — now face the question of whether to license payments or acquire their own rails, as Samsung did with LoopPay.
Third-order effects
- If automakers keep buying payments companies, the industry shifts from selling vehicles to owning the transaction layer around them, with parking — the earliest recurring driver payment — as the beachhead.
The trend: Automakers are acquiring mobile payments technology to control the transaction layer of on-demand mobility, following the path device makers took with LoopPay and Apple Pay.