Sector deep dive
Parking
Ticketless, barrier-free parking already knows which vehicles enter a car park. What it cannot see is who is driving, whose account should pay, or whether a permit holder is actually in the vehicle. Trust App's patented method could close that gap.
How parking payment works today
Modern car parks increasingly run without tickets or barriers. Cameras read number plates on entry and exit, the stay is timed against the plate, and payment is taken at a machine, on a website, or automatically from an account the plate is registered to. Permits and season tickets are usually administered as lists of plates, and a stay that goes unpaid becomes a parking charge notice sent to the registered keeper.
The model is convenient and cheap to run, but everything hangs on one data point: the plate. That creates a set of familiar operational problems.
Where the plate-only model hurts
Auto-pay charges the account, not the driver
A plate registered to an auto-pay account bills that account whoever is behind the wheel. A borrowed car, a sold car or a pool car all charge the wrong person, and each mischarge produces a refund, a complaint and a customer who turns auto-pay off.
Missed reads mean free stays
A plate the camera cannot read cleanly often means no record of the visit at all. The stay goes unbilled and unenforceable, and across a busy estate those quiet gaps become a steady leak of revenue.
Misreads become wrongly issued charges
A misread plate can pair the wrong entry with the wrong exit, or send a parking charge to a motorist who was never on site. Each one generates an appeal, staff time and reputational damage for the operator and the landowner.
Disputes rest on a camera image
When a charge is challenged, the operator's evidence is usually a photograph of a plate and a timestamp. That says little about who was driving or whether a permit genuinely applied, so disputes are slow, uncertain and expensive to defend.
Permits follow vehicles, not people
Staff permits, resident permits and season tickets are really about a person, but a plate-based register applies them to a vehicle regardless of who is in it. Permits get lent, shared and left on sold vehicles, and operators have little way to check.
What matters in this sector
For a parking operator, the technology question is secondary. What matters is what the car park has to achieve, what gets in the way, and what could improve.
What you need to achieve
Collect payment for every stay, keep entry and exit frictionless, administer permits and season tickets fairly, keep enforcement defensible, and give landowners and customers a service they trust.
What gets in the way
Appeal and refund workloads, revenue leakage from unreadable plates, auto-pay complaints from mischarged customers, permits that are hard to police, and disputes defended on camera images alone.
What could improve
Charges that follow a verified account rather than a plate, permits verified to the person present, fewer wrongly issued parking charges, and stronger evidence when a charge is challenged.
How the patented method could apply
- Account-based ticketless parking. A registered user's vehicle and device are recognised together on entry, and the stay is charged to the account of the person verified as present, not to whoever the plate was once registered to.
- Permits verified to the person. A permit or season ticket linked to a person could apply only when that person's registered device is present in the vehicle, rather than whenever the vehicle appears.
- A second check before a charge is issued. An uncertain or partial plate read could be cross-checked against registered accounts present at the site before a parking charge is raised, reducing both wrongly issued notices and unbilled stays.
- Better evidence for appeals. A record that an account holder's device was, or was not, present gives both sides of an appeal something firmer than a camera image.
- Recognising a returning customer. A verified arrival could let an operator greet a known customer, apply their tariff or permission automatically, and remove payment steps entirely.
Each of these would be built by or with a partner into the operator's existing systems. None of them exists as a Trust product today, and the precise design would depend on the site, its rules and its suppliers.
Who we would like to speak to
Conversations in this sector are likely to be most productive with:
- parking operators running ticketless or barrier-free sites;
- parking payment providers and auto-pay platforms;
- permit-management platforms serving workplaces and residents' schemes;
- local authorities operating or procuring parking services.
This page describes potential applications of a patented method. It does not describe an existing product or a live deployment, and commercial arrangements would be subject to discussion and legal agreement.