Volkswagen is looking for some change and parking money in a Vancouver company.
The German auto giant’s financial services division has acquired PayByPhone, a mobile payments service that allows drivers to forgo coins at meters by using a smartphone app to pay for parking.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“The mobile payment movement has exploded recently, and we look forward to accelerating our consumer parking and payments agenda made possible by this deal," PayByPhone CEO Kush Parikh said in a statement.
PayByPhone was founded in 2001 before the City of Vancouver began using the service in 2006.
It services 13,000 parking spaces in Vancouver, 12,000 spaces in Seattle and 155,000 spaces in Paris, and has 12.5 million customers worldwide.
PayByPhone said it has processed more than $250 million payments in 2016 and is adding about 7,000 users daily.
Christian Dahlheim, a board member responsible for sales and marketing at Volkswagen Financial Services AG, said in a statement his organization would be using PayByPhone’s know-how to develop a “separate business field around the theme of parking.”
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