Episode 74 - Scaling Through Times of Turbulent Tech with Peter O’Driscoll

Speaker A: The Beatles are known for being quite litigious. Has Ringo Starr been in contact?

Speaker B: No, no, I think he's, uh, no longer around to ask the question.

Speaker A: If you're trying to suggest that Ringo Starr's dead, that's news I haven't heard. But, uh, hello and welcome to that tech show with, uh, me, Chris Adams, and that guy with the dog, Sam Gregory. If you hadn't tuned into last week's episode, then first of all, why not? Uh, you heard that this is a momentous one for us today as it marks the very last that tech show.

Speaker C: Yes, that's right. So unless Elon Musk comes knocking on our door, the time has come for us to part ways and focus on some exciting new things that we couldn't have done without you, dear listener, and this show. So, Chris, why don't you let the listeners know what you've been working on or what you will be working on.

Speaker A: Well, apart from getting over Covid, which you might be able to hear from my voice, I've been working in startup land at the moment as a CTO for two businesses. One called In Good Company, which is designed to help you find and connect with local ethical small businesses doing their bit for the planet. And Clymistry, which is a climate accounting firm helping manufacturers to get paid for decarbonizing. Whilst all of this is going on, I'll still be working to pay the bills as a contractor digital transformer. Uh, so if you're interested in my services for agile, uh, delivery, project, program, engineering, management or architecture, then you can get in touch.

Speaker C: There you go. Cheeky little plug there. All sounds really exciting and ambitious to be fair. Well, as usual, I can't sit still. And in fact, over the last week I've been working on a new product. I was inspired by Peter Levels, who you might know from the Avatar me craze that went viral a few weeks ago. I did it. It was hilarious. But I know him from Nomad List, which is kind of the community tool that I use to do my nomadic adventure, my little travel adventures as a community there. He's, uh, an interesting chap and you'll see his latest, uh, well, his pinned tweet, the amount of things that he has built versus the ones that actually have come good and uh, earning him some money. So I thought, why don't just start building mine and other people's ideas. So that's kind of what I've been doing and what I kind of want to keep doing. So expect a launch. Crowdfunding in the next few days. And other than that, I'm planning a new podcast all about immersive theater and continuing to build my company, who have some very exciting projects in the works.

Speaker A: So we just wanted to take a moment to thank you, dear listener, uh, for listening and supporting us over the last 74 episodes, including this one, of course. And uh, you can find us individually on the socials if you want to reach out and obviously in future podcasts.

Speaker C: So with that all out the way, who do we have on today's episode? Chris?

Speaker A: Today we have Peter o' Driscoll who joins us from Ringo, the car parking app, which you might have used around London or various cities across the country. And this is a fantastic episode to end on really as we get into the nuances of Ringo's journey and how they pivoted from train station parking into city centre parking and their plans to provide digital parking across all of Europe. So we get into the nitty gritty of, uh, why parking is so inconsistent and all of the different jurisdictions that Ringo have to negotiate with.

Speaker C: It's a jam packed episode to end on. So without further ado, here is Peter o'. Driscoll.

Speaker B: My name is Peter o' Driscoll and I'm the managing director for Ringo. I've been working with the business now for almost 12, 13 years and I've pretty much seen the growth of the industry from kind of almost startup to where it is today, being a fully fledged common brand and that people recognize in the marketplace.

Speaker A: Well, thank you very much for joining us, Peter. It's a pleasure. Um, so Ringo, how many people are going to not know what Ringo is?

Speaker B: That's a really good question.

Speaker C: Odd question, isn't it?

Speaker A: What a strange start. Anyway, we'll go from there.

Speaker B: There is an audience who don't know. I always say that anybody who hasn't got a car probably won't have heard of us. I think we're very much a user, uh, based product. So if you don't have a need for our service, the chances are you may or may not know who we are in the marketplace. So I think that probably answers that question. I think if you have a car and you're paying for parking in any major city or coastal location, you're bound to know who Ringo is.

Speaker C: How would you describe Ringo? Uh, in a sentence?

Speaker B: Ringo for me is hopefully a forgettable experience and it's a simple way of paying for parking because if it isn't forgettable, we've done a bad job.

Speaker C: Yeah, because like obviously councils and, and all the rest of it might own car park thing, but I guess you're buying land and renting out US carpet to get to the nuts and bolts of how it sort of works. Like, how does Ringo operate on.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think. I think you're going to see Ringo as being kind of the, um, Trivago or Airbnb of parking. Very much similar model to themselves. We're more of a marketplace. And in our scenario, we kind of get our contracts with two main methodologies. First being through a tender procurement process where a local, uh, authority will put a tender out and we will then bid for that contract. So we as an organization don't own any assets or inventory. In terms of physical car parks, we kind of sit over the top of that as the payment service provider to facilitate easier payments on the car park itself.

Speaker A: So I first came across Ringo in London. So how broad a spread does Ringo have?

Speaker B: Yeah, so the Ringo, um, brand in the UK operates across probably about 65% of all local authorities. Um, so they're quite prevalent in the local authority space. But in the last few years we've been going quite heavily in the private operator space as well. A private operator is simply a private company manages a car park. To give you an idea of what I mean by those two kind of marketplaces, in terms of our coverage, ah, we cover from very much, you know, the furthest corner of the southeast of England, uh, southwest of England, sorry, all the way up to Scotland. Um, so we're a national provider in the uk and if you look at our ownership and heritage, um, we started off as a domestic brand and then we've gone through a series of acquisitions, uh, the most recent being, um, the sale by BMW and Daimler, who previously owned US, to EasyPark Group. And the Easy Part Group operates in about 26, 27 countries across the globe with a strong presence in Europe, uh, and then a strong presence in America, um, Australia and a few other territories. But predominantly a European business.

Speaker C: On that note, I'm really interested in how companies and businesses evolve and develop through either acquisition or market need. So were you a different company right in those early days and you've sort of found your feet to get to this cashless parking system now, or have you, have you remained pretty, uh, consistent in that respect, and these acquisitions has just given you more leverage to expand?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I think in the, in the uk, um, Ringo as it is today consists of two former companies, Park Mobile UK Limited and Ringo. Um, and Park Mobile acquired the Ringo business back in 2012 Outside of that the growth of Ringo in the UK has been organic or through sales acquisition. We haven't gone and acquired other organizations, we've grown the market ourselves. So it's really been down to a gritted and determined salesforce. And I think from a kind of end user perspective, yes we have bumps in the early days, um, no one doesn't need to develop new technology. You got to cast your mind back 12, 13 years ago the iPhone didn't exist, certainly not the App store. So we started the service on ivr, which is a interactive voice recognition system. So like you might go to pay for your credit card or, or your parking fine through a touch tone phone facility. That's how we started. So yes there were bumps and I think it was really with the advent of the phone parking apps that we really kind of started to really grow and accelerate from an adoption perspective. Um, so I think to answer your question, The Ringo of 10 years ago, yes it was a different business, uh, we were much more multi hatted so you're doing more than one particular task or role. Whereas now we've grown the workforce from about probably then to 30 people to over 150 today and we're very much focused on particular disciplines and skill sets, um, which is what has been the big change. But in terms of ownership changes, you know, over and above that, when BMW and Daimler came along that was ready for them to try and facilitate um, bringing the phone parking apps into their dashboards or cars because they believe very much in kind of the autonomous journey where you're paying for parking and driving and navigating, it's all done through a dashboard. Um now I think when the pandemic came along the big manufacturers really thought we need to offload our non, uh core activities. So we were disposed of. But I think their ownership didn't really impact Ringo's presence in the marketplace or indeed our product roadmap or development. And very much the same with EasyPark. They've come along, they've bought the brand and they're buying us for uh, our skill set and our expertise and know how in the marketplace.

Speaker A: So were you in there right from the start then?

Speaker B: Not from the very start, no. Um, so I joined what was the uh, part mobile side of the business back in 2009 and so we were pretty much in from the start there. There was only three contracts that we had when I came into the organization. So I've been pretty much from the, wouldn't quite say seed, but certainly from the first breakthrough of the seed through the soil into a small stem. And um, then with the ringo acquisition in 2012 that kind of bought number three and number two, uh, together. And back then we probably had about, probably 55, 60 contracts combined, whereas today we've got nearer 250 contracts which given the sort of size of the inventory and land available in the uk, that's quite a strong position to have.

Speaker C: I'm keen to get to a bit about you actually because uh, have you always been interested in kind of this sort of industry? How did you end up joining?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's really a combination of factors, kind of what appealed to me as an individual. Um, so my first kind of job uh, outside university was a startup in the Middle east and that's for a traditional media trade publication which eventually went digital. Um, but back then you know, the Internet was just coming alive. Email was pretty much a closed network. So you know, you're talking just before the breakthrough of you know, the Internet revolution, for better word. And so what I liked about the phone parking business was it was at that early stage of growth, it gone beyond conceptual but no one knew if it's going to scale or not. You know you had to convince people to stop using cash and start using their phones to pay to park. So that uh, that appealed to me quite a lot. And then equally in my background I worked for NCP National Car Parks. Um, I did that for five or six years and um, I then found myself being approached by park, uh, mobile who wanted someone who had kind of been a startup experience, understood the parking market. Uh and I also had some time working for lease plan and fleet side of the organization and also got the B2B side. So there was a perfect match from a kind of product construct that part mobile were looking for in terms of where they want to take the business to, from a, uh, B2C to a more B2B focused business but also knowing how to deal with the parking industry and the kind of nuances that sit behind it. So that's how I kind of found my way into the phone parking business. Combination of it being new tech startup and some background parking.

Speaker C: I was going to ask like what, what Trying to break down the years here. Like what was the tech like when you, when you left uni? Was the iPhone out at this point or was this. Yeah, so this is like traditional telephone sort of paying for parking I guess, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean the, I arrived in phone parking in 2009. So prior to that, you know, when I was in the Middle east, um, which was around the late 90s, the website wasn't really there, certainly not that part of the world. Um, it might have been in the uk, but you know, being at university, I remember this great thing, you know, internal email you couldn't send outside the university, but it was a closed system. So really it's just been a gentle journey. But if you look at probably From I'd say mid-90s, late-90s through to the early, early noughties, big jumps are made. And so lots of companies moving away from contact centers, you know, to web based services, online tools, you can order, say your vehicle, you can order your cinema tickets, everything moved online. So there's a big shift there. And in our case, you know, you couldn't carry around a laptop or a big piece of kit to park your car, you had to use your phone. And so it wasn't until the advent of, as I said to the App Store or Google Play that we were able to really uh, speed up the adoption of phone parking.

Speaker A: It must be quite a big difference between somewhere like ncp. Ringo, I mean what's NCP like? I mean obviously I know your experience there is a little outdated now I guess, but you know, I think um, almost everybody in the UK has come across an NCP at some point.

Speaker B: Mhm. Yes. I mean at NCP I worked on the commercial side of the organization and uh, what I liked about the company at the time was they gave you a lot of freedom, a lot of freedom to really grow in a role but also bring new concepts and ideas into the organization. Now the organization had very much been a cash generating business. It's very much a property company because the original founders, they happen to buy land and sweat the land or the asset by providing parking. They made their big money selling car parks to property developers to build houses or to build um, office blocks or whatever it might be to redevelop it. So NCP had gone through a sale um, when I joined them and they were owned by venture capitalists and they really wanted to make income outside of selling property. Um, and they had to in effect adopt a much more consumer focused approach. And again if you cast your minds back to probably when you were younger, you know, in the back of your folks car going to a car park, there'd be a guy in a box, you have a bucket and you throw a couple of pounds in and you get a ticket to leave or get your ticket stamped.

Speaker A: Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: So NCP had this kind of started to come away from that cash business. They're still very much, you know, generating lots of income back then. But it's really starting to see how they could use technology to um, improve their cost base, um, but also to bring more products and services to users. So NCP back then was an exciting place to be because they wanted to change things. Um, and my task there really from my background at least plan was to bring you know, fleet users to the car parks. How do you do that? You create a product. Now again you can't go to a fleet company and say, or a fleet manager, hey, give your drivers five pound each and change. You've got a solution. No, you had to move to a card based product. So we set about a program there to um, in effect automate a large part of the NCP parking estate. And back then it was okay, what does everyone have in their hand? Credit cards, debit cards, so you max stripe the estate. And then what we then is we approached White Label partners to in effect give us a uh, a mag card based solution, brand it as ncp. And then we launched what was then called um, I think in fact it's still around today, NCP Gateway. It was the first kind of fleet product for parking, uh, by automating the estate and using the coverage that they had to offer a fleet based card solution for users. Um, so that was a great journey for me to go on. A good two year kind of technological transformation to go through with that organization.

Speaker A: Is it a bit of a difficult sell though from when you're on the NCP side? Because obviously you've got the basis of you know, everybody knows what it is. There's usually one in every city, every town across the country. But they're um, they can be quite grim places, a lot of them. So like I guess there's positives and negatives to that is there?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think you know parking in the UK as a general construct um, is of a different standard that in Europe. Okay. Um, I wouldn't levy that at NCP store. Um, I've been to, and I'm not leaving in my client stores either but I've been to numerous parking establishments where the quality has been questionable. But I think that kind of reflects the short term nature of some car parks. Well it's only going to be a car park for two or three years and it's going to get knocked down again. And if they were to go through that expensive kind of refurb program, do you as a user will be paying five, six times more to park. So it's a balance between quality and price how I kind of answer that. But I admit, you know, there was, there was a mixed estate. There were some really good, nice car parks, um, and there were some other car parks that weren't so nice. But that's the nature of parking.

Speaker C: It's interesting though that you say that essentially the money was made on the sale of the, the asset. I guess, and I guess to your point as well, it's that balance, like, well, how much if the intent is just to make money while you hold onto that asset, how much investment do you actually make in the tech? How much investment do you make in the, the upkeep of, of that thing where it, you go in and it does the job? You. You know, a really random fact I have is, you remember that show Malcolm in the Middle?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Frankie Muniz, the lead character, he, uh, he didn't really do a lot when he left Malcolm, but what he did do would use all his money to buy up car parking things. And you know, it's land, it's, it's an asset and you're just making money on that asset.

Speaker A: So it's a random fact.

Speaker C: It is a random fact. You can take that, you can tell anyone you want.

Speaker B: I'll make that one for another interview.

Speaker C: There you go.

Speaker A: He was also a racing driver, as that's another random fact to him. But anyway, we're real off topic

Speaker C: thinking about owning the asset and all the rest of it. That's an interesting then transition into Ringo, which like you say, is, doesn't own the land. Was it hard, do you think, to convince people that this was. It was there was obvious that there was a need that someone has, someone has an asset and they don't want to handle the payments and they don't want to handle that transactional stuff. Was it an easy sell or a hard sell to make that happen, do you think?

Speaker B: To be honest with you, across the marketplace you got different people in different head spaces. Some are looking to the future, some are, uh, I'll wait and see what else does. And some, uh, are I like what I do. It's not broken. Don't change it. Okay, so you kind of those three buckets of, of kind of people. And I think it's fair to say they were the early adopters, you know, so the earliest one being London borough of Wandsworth, which was in 2004, many, many years ago, were the first ones to go live, uh, with phone parking in the uk. And then what you then have was kind of a trickle and then you kind of Hit say a wall. But certainly it became more challenging. So the way we addressed that challenge um, was really our go to market. So our go to market was we won't charge you as a provider, we'll make our money from the end user. Therefore this is risk free for you in terms of a uh, cost outlay. Because originally we thought about know license fees, the charges commissions to the operator. But the operator, you know, when you look at the kind of um, cake to go around now in the parking market, it was, it was becoming very tight back then and um, so they didn't really want to bring an additional service without knowing if it's going to work or, or, or save money. So really for us, to answer your question, once uh, we've gone past the lower doctors, it was a bit of a kind of a slow nudge, about 18 months, two years. Then all of a sudden we kind of like a domino effect going and all those kind of we're waiting to see in the middle really kind of took um, the product up um, and we had what's kind of like a network effect or cluster effect. So for example we followed the railways down into different territories. So our first deploys were on First Great Western um, and SWR as they now are called. And if you look at our kind of geographical footprint we'd be talking to operators saying look, we're in the railway car park, got a great take up with some proof points on it. Um, and then they said actually we'll, we'll give us a go as well. So it kind of grew in that fashion if that makes sense.

Speaker C: You had this challenge that you, you know, you didn't, wasn't sure that the uptake would be as, as it needed to be. Was there a lot of research and, and discovery on your part to really find out where, where the need was. So it sounds like you landed on a railway companies to, to get that explosion. Was that intentional? Was that through research that you sort of found that out and thought ah, uh, that's a good market to hit?

Speaker B: Yeah. So it was intentional because you had regular users who, who were uh, from kind of a distressed purchase perspective. You know, if you drive into a city and you go to a meeting, you're going to go shopping or go retail, you can wait 10 minutes to, you know, to again get your change from a shop and come back and top up the meter or whatever you need to do. You've got that kind of luxury of time on your hands when you're in the railway space. You know that You've got to get that train, you've arrived at the car park, you haven't got your change, what are you going to do? You can't miss your train, not want another one for another half an hour. So you've got to in effect run the gauntlet. So that's the first reason we had regular users who were facing real distress on their, on their parking payments. Second thing was all day parking generally is quite a high tariff, um, particularly you know, around the home counties compared to you know, small local retail. So therefore the average person didn't have 7 pound 80 change in their pocket in pound coins. So again from a convenience perspective we were there and then once you've gone through the process of registering the reusability of the product is really simple, really easy. So provide you making that repeating experience forgettable people will then come back to you. So we targeted it because high frequency of um, parking, high tariff and this was a distressed user group that needed a solution that was very deliberate.

Speaker C: So was the long term vision train operators or train stations rather for Ringo?

Speaker B: No, no.

Speaker C: Uh, and so with that then did you see it as like a sidestep to be like right, we'll get the rail groups, we get those case studies in effect we'll prove the concept to then get to our goal. Because I'm just, I'm just trying to think about our listeners and their startup journey and, and having to side step.

Speaker B: Yeah, so it was really a springboard. You know the railways are still important part of our business so it's a business that we value and cherish. So you know the, the railways are probably my m, my top 10 customers in terms of volume or in my top 10. So that market still important but the railways aren't as big as the rest of the uk so the reason we're going to the railways was because they were early adopters and you can see the need for it. And the railways, you know, always need to kind of provide better solutions. Part of their kind of franchise, they have to deliver improved uh, services to users. So the kind of railway mindset of thinking was aligned to bringing new technology onto the car parks. But once we had done that we realized there was a lot more opportunity in the wider parking market. I mean, give you an idea, local authority parking spend is about 1.1 billion in terms of parking receipts. So that's much bigger than the railway industry, you know, combined. Um, so we realized there was a bigger uh, pie out there to go after. Um, and the railways were kind of an underpinner for people. Because if you're a regular railway user, when you're at home or at weekends, you then shop and park in other locations, in other areas. And most people will journey within 10, 15 mile distance of their house. So by being a railway user, you then start saying to your local authority, hey, why haven't you got this in the town center? So it's very much a kind of advocacy position, but also just getting that kind of critical mass built up in a geographical region.

Speaker C: And so how do you find this information out about spend, about demand? Is it going out and speaking to people? Are there resources online or things like that?

Speaker B: Yeah, so, um, for the public sector, uh, um, they have to publish annual reports on their income. And Sipha, um, also collates and parking data as well. So it's a combination of publicly available data. Uh, but also when we talk to our clients, we ask them, you know, what's your total purse on casual parking? You know, what is it? So we've collated over the many years, um, a good understanding of the size of the marketplace. But priceless being, should we say, firmly in the space, we use information tools like zipfa, uh, together the original data so we could target the relevant authorities to go after our solution with.

Speaker C: Yeah, again, I'm just trying to think of startup founders and people who are listening to this and trying to grow their company. It seems like a very strategic and methodical way to, um, identify markets and approach them.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And there's also other data. You'll have to forgive me, I can't remember the name of the source, but there are mapping tools out there where you can actually see, well, you know, from based on sort of highways data. You can see where people are moving from, so you know where they live, where they're traveling from. You can then see where people traveling into. So if you were somebody else kind of in a startup phase, um, and let's say you were looking at, I don't know, space availability or commute patterns, you know, or mobility patterns. In fact, you're kind of your sweet spot as a provider in terms of a new technology startup. You can start looking at that kind of data to work at where people are traveling to and from. Um, and you can also use things like phone mask data where you can pinpoint, you know, where people are moving to see what people's movements are. So it's getting that kind of data, it's anonymized, but at least gives you an idea where to focus your kind of approach.

Speaker A: So thinking about that then you um, you mentioned that when you were starting on this that it was all IVR stuff. So, you know, actually calling up voice recognition. Were there many pivot points that you made on your journey to actually what Ringo has become today?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I think in terms of pivot points, the initial process, you know, was a combination of call center to do registration and then IVR to do the subsequent bookings. And the reason we had it that way was because to do speech recognition on number plates, it's quite hard. But a problem with that is it's not scalable because if your average call lasts two and a half, three minutes on a good day and you're explaining a new technology and people ask lots of questions, all of a sudden that calls costing three pound fifty.

Speaker A: I remember this as well. I remember doing it. I was an early adopter of uh, all of these park, uh, mobile actually I think in fact. So I do remember having to call up and I actually remember at the time there was a lot of different providers. So you'd go from one borough in London to another and you've got to call up and do your registration over and over again. But yeah. So you're saying that was a high cost then?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it was because, you know, we're making a, uh, we're a pennies business, you know, and we have large volumes, we make pennies, whereas call centers work on pounds. So we, we couldn't longer term sustain that. So, you know, it's okay when you're registering, uh, five, six thousand people a week. No, no problem. But when you're a business, like not week, sorry, a month when you, when you're a business our size and you know, we're processing now Probably 2 million new users every month even now in our maturity curve. So it's 2 million users a year, not, not a, um, month, sorry. So you can't service that through uh, you know, a call center.

Speaker A: But that's still a huge growth. That's still, that's still pretty massive. Do you still have call centers? Is that still, uh, Is that still.

Speaker B: Yes, we do. Yeah. So the call center is there to deal with you if you get into difficulty. So if you have uh, experienced a problem on the ivr, we have, you know, breakout points that will help you. But increasingly, you know, looking at my throughput today, you know, the business now is 92%, 90% app. So you don't need those as much call center support as you once did many years ago, you know, and coming back to kind of the turning points in the business. It was, okay, how do we automate the registration process that's pivotal to us being financially viable? So we developed speech recognition and we did lots of automated tooling and training on the speech Rec, um, so that we're able to get something like almost 78% of people through using speech rec.

Speaker A: Was that proprietary stuff?

Speaker B: Yes, it was, yeah.

Speaker A: Oh, wow. So is that something that you're still using or something you've resold as a technology? I mean, what have you done with it?

Speaker B: We still have it and we still use it. Um, but increasingly most people are registering through an app, not through the ivr. But yeah, when people go through it, it's the same speech rec technology that's in there today. Um, it was nuanced a good 10, 11 years ago and it served us really, really well, uh, up until now.

Speaker A: But not something that you've finding, um, another avenue to sell it.

Speaker B: No, I mean our core is, you know, to continue to drive more penetration using apps. You know, I think if we're honest with ourselves, it's cost effective because people can see what they're doing, they can check what they're doing in the flow. And there's very few user mistakes using an app. Um, with an ivr, you know, if we were to try and sell that on, then we'd have demands to maintain that service, keep enhancing it. It takes away from the core of what we're doing, which is making the user journey on the apps, you know, as efficient and as smooth as possible. But, but also looking at future product roadmap stuff around the business. 12 years ago was IVR based. Today it's app based. In 12 years time, will it be in car?

Speaker A: Yeah. So you mentioned with uh, the Daimler BMW connection, how widely used was the in car experience when you were working with those folks?

Speaker B: Yeah, so the in car experience has been deployed with BMW. It's live in the UK at the moment. It's also live in Germany. I don't get too carried away on countries now. Netherlands in my head, um, from a kind of Ringo. Say Ringo, it's our other brands in Europe, but from a kind of our business perspective. Um, so that, that, that's live and we've also done some integrations and um, some pilots where we're kind of tracking your, your movement. So when you stop it says, hey, do you want to, um, start parking? Yes you do. When you drive off it says, hey, do you want to stop parking? So we're kind of piloting that sort of stuff. If I'M honest with you, the uptake within in car hasn't been as high as I'd expect it to be, principally because it's embedded quite deep within a navigation system or the uh, in car providers. Um, so as a consequence, you know, if I look at some of the work we've done with Polestar in Europe, there's much greater throughput there because it's based on the app integrating into the head unit as opposed to in car proprietary development.

Speaker C: What does that mean? Sorry, can you, can you rephrase that a little bit?

Speaker B: Yeah. So if you look at vehicle manufacturers, um, some of them have gone down the path of developing the services within their dashboard. So that's what I mean by the in console in head experience. Whereas if you look at the Polestar platform, it's very much a uh, Google based platform and you're bringing existing app services into the vehicle. So for the user the experience isn't too dissimilar. So on the Polestar where we've done that with EasyPark in Europe, um, you know, you're almost seeing a replica of the app on your screen in the car. So you're going in there, you start your parking and it's an integrated transaction. Whereas with the in car proprietary like the BMW type navigation, you've got to go click navigation, click parking, click pay for parking. So it's not a uh, smooth experience. So the uptake as a consequence isn't as high as it should be.

Speaker C: Yeah, and I guess we're moving a lot. Well, Apple's ambition is to have CarPlay really integrated in so many cars and you say the Android obviously and things like that. So is the future there, the deals with Apple and Google or is it with the actual car manufacturers trusting that they will, they'll stop developing their own bespoke experience for their car and then just say we just accept CarPlay or we just accept Android sort of thing?

Speaker B: Yes. So what we're seeing um, across a number of manufacturers, um, some have got there already, some are getting there is very much taking uh, a ah, closed bucket of products from whether it be Apple or Google. They're saying these are the service we're allowing car through the Apple Play service for example. So I think that's where it will go if it's going to scale. That's my personal opinion. And we're seeing the vehicle manufacturers moving that direction.

Speaker C: Yeah, because again it's not their specialty. You know, they want to build cars, they want to build great cars. And if there are software companies providing that software, then they'll probably off, just offload it to them, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. And I think as well, you always got to think about the conditions that make this an ideal service. What do I mean by that? I mean the market conditions in our space. So the market conditions in the UK are uh, very much tender driven, which to your point earlier, you were talking about the fact that you've got to register with multiple providers each time you move across boroughs. If you're in car, you don't really want that, you want one provider. So to make that a reality, uh, the market construct needs to change in the UK to what's called an open market. So an open market is a situation or market construct where you have multiple providers providing their apps at the same parking space. So if you go to, um, the Netherlands today, they actually have anything from seven to 10 providers operating in the same parking bay as in app providers. So you as a user, you go to your, go to app. Because I'm pretty confident when you drive around London or any part of the uk, you don't look at the sign, you just think, phone parking is going to be here. I can see a sticker somewhere in the distance. You get your app out, hopefully, Ringo, and you put a location code in and 60, uh, percent of time it will work and a third of the time it won't because we're not in that particular territory. So it's quite frustrating for a user if you apply that to the in car experience. The car isn't as intelligent as you because it doesn't know where we are on in theory. So by having kind of ubiquitous coverage, by opening the marketplace up, you can then roam freely and that really links into the next big thing that's coming in terms of a big problem or challenge or issue that we have to tackle. And that's how do you facilitate EV charging? Because if we have this ambition to remove diesel and petrol engines from production by 2030, there will be by 2035, 40, most of the UK running around electric. Now, right now the whole charge place market is very fragmented, much like phone parking was 13, 14 years ago. Give you an idea the magnitude of something like 30 charge point operators out there today. So you're in your car, you've got to build onto 30 services. That's not going to work. You need an open market where you have payment happening across all those charge point providers.

Speaker A: So how does that work at the moment? Is that something that you're actively working on? Is this the direction for the company

Speaker B: so if you look, we're quite fortunate being part of uh, a wider European organization. So in Norway, um, they're about seven to eight years ahead of us on EV adoption as a kind of nation. And so we, recognizing that, have been tackling this challenge of how do you deal with parking and charging? Because the problem to solve is threefold ease of payment for charging. But then how do you manage the parking bay? How do you enforce that parking bay? Is it a free parking session, pay for charging, you pay for both, or you just pay for parking, your charges included? So what we've done there, we've integrated with about 70% of the marketplace there to provide a, uh, one stop payment solution. So that when you go across the territory, you can park and charge in one transaction or you can do, if it happens to be a standalone charge only bay and the parking's free, that you can just charge with us as well. So we've kind of cracked that nut already. But to bring that to the uk, you've got to open up the marketplace for payment for parking in the first instance. Because you don't do that. You can't crack the nut on charging.

Speaker C: Yeah, because I guess if a car's charging on the road. I was actually having a conversation with some, with some students. They were trying to figure something out,

Speaker B: um, about this as well.

Speaker C: I suppose if someone is charging on the side of the road, you, you naturally gonna have to charge for the parking first. Right. They need to pay for the, the use of that land, I guess in some way.

Speaker B: So it's uh, and, and the same in car parks too, because there's only probably about two and a half, maybe 3,000 barrier car parks in the UK. The rest are on what are open lots, where it's a pen display machine or it's a phone parking service. So it's not just an on street problem, it's an industry problem that needs to be solved. And I think by opening the market up to what's called an open market approach, which is in place in Europe, it's been there for 15, 20 years, you could actually solve several problems. You fix the consumer disruption of. I can't use the app here because I haven't got it registered on my phone. You deal with the charging problem longer term. I mean the charging issue for me isn't upon us today because there's enough combustion engines still running around, so it's not present in front of mind. But it's a situation, a scenario that is coming to us.

Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. Do you have Any idea of where that D day is? Because there must be, uh, there must be a cadence that we're adopting EV vehicles and there must be a number of EV charging spots available. So there must be a tipping point.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: Do you have any idea when that is?

Speaker B: I think the tipping point in terms of it being a problem in for users, it's about four to five years away. Reason I say that is the average person keeps a calf. So the average life cycle of a car, not person, sorry, is between eight to 10 years. Yeah. And if I look at my, my friendship circle, uh, my peer group, those who are getting company cars as part of their package and benefits at work, they're all going electric. Everybody else I know is staying either hybrid or combustion engine. So it would take some time for that to wash its, wash through in the system. Which is why I think it's four to five years away, maybe even six years away. And I think, you know, we have a unique opportunity here to change the marketplace of payments. And we shouldn't just see it as charge payments, we just see it payments for parking and charging. That's how we got to see it in the future. And uh, if we were to open the market up for payments of parking, then I think the EV probably would naturally flow as a fix. That makes sense.

Speaker A: You're always talking about webflow. So what is webflow?

Speaker C: Well, webflow is a platform completely online, completely in the browser that allows you to build websites using no code, zero code. I mean it has the potential to build low code websites. That's low code. But there's real power is in the no code way of building websites. I don't know, it's fantastic. A lot of designers I would say have actually built their careers off of webflow, which is really powerful really because a lot of them didn't, weren't able to offer this kind of service. So designers are picking up webflow and building their whole careers. Being able to design a website and then being able to actually implement it and earn a great living off of building webflow websites. So you want to start up a new company or uh, bought your domain name through namecheap.com affiliate link down below and there's a description, then you can link that to a webflow website and um, start designing, start building a website with absolutely no code. And they do also have a templating library as well. So you can go out and buy a template to get started. And my first webflow website was built, I kid you not, four hours.

Speaker A: So if you want to uh, code along with Sam. Then you can click the affiliate link that we have in our uh, description for this episode, wherever you're listening to it. Or you can head over to that tech show and take a look at the affiliate links there and click through to webflow. And by doing that you're going to be giving something back to that tech show because we get a little bit of kickback when you click that button.

Speaker C: There you go. No excuses.

Speaker A: I think it's really interesting, the idea of sort of, um, having an open market for parking spaces. I think that would be a, I would certainly be interesting to see how that behaved. I mean, do you feel that's almost a way of outsmarting your competitors in a way, like because you've got quite a large market share or. I mean, how would places compete? How would apps or apps or companies compete? I mean, is it, um, would it be on point one price, would it be on tariff or you know, what would be the differentiator?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's a really good question, Nat. Um, the parking fee is the parking fee. So if it's £2 an hour, it's £2 an hour for all of us. Okay. As phone app providers.

Speaker A: And who sets that?

Speaker B: That's set by, um, in the case of public sector, uh, it's done through traffic orders called TROs.

Speaker A: Really. Okay.

Speaker B: And there's a whole process where they go out, publicize a tariff change, then that's set in stone. We as a marketplace then charge a convenience fee for using our product and that's where you compete potentially. And I think, you know, the average person isn't sensitive TO Is it 10p or is it 20p a transaction on top of the parking fee? You know, people would rather have their preferred product. So what changes in the operating model is twofold really. The moment the M model in the UK is very focused on got to keep the council happy, got to keep the private operator happy. So you could in theory have the worst service in the world, but you're cheap so you get procured as a provider. Now if you change a construct that we're making money from the end user, we have to be on top of our innovation, got to keep changing our products. Not only that, we've got to look at offering, in my opinion, wider services. We could be, we move away from being what's kind of a one dimensional offer to being other services. And what could you bring in? You can bring in B2B, you can have a fleet offering, you can expand out to that user base. You can bring in charging, which we've talked about at length already. You can bring in tolling. You know, then you can actually say, well, actually, why don't offer you a subscription package. If you look at, uh, you know, a comparable industry, not in terms of parking, but in terms of payments, you know, when the Istore first launched, you had to pay to download a track. Yeah. Or you had to pay for your films. Now it's all on subscription and everyone's happy because they're not getting in their head, uh, a charge I don't want. They got a budgeted cost. And in our space you could move from this kind of transactional model to a subscription model, which could be, hey, package one is just parking, package two is EV and parking package three includes tolling. So you, you change your offer and I think you continually innovate to stay in front. If you don't, someone new will come in and take your spot. And the other thing the open market does is it opens it up to competition. Our industry has had no new competitors for six or seven years in the uk.

Speaker A: That's interesting. Why do you think that is? Why have, uh, there not been any sort of pretenders to the throne?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's barrier to entry. It's because you need to go through a tender process. Contracts are fixed for three to five years and the tender process never results in a price increase. It's always a price decrease. So, yeah, people outside the marketplace are saying, we can see Ringo's dominant. Um, our competitor pay by phone has good market share. Uh, and there are other providers, you know, who have, you know, niche services. You've got about five or six, maybe seven providers in the UK who have a, uh, certain niche in certain segments of our parking market. So the reality is it's hard to crack in. Whereas with an open market, you in effect grant what's called an authorization model, where you're given a set of service standards you have to meet in terms of system uptime, call center support, etc. Then more players will come in. We've seen that in Europe. We've seen the market continue to flourish and new providers emerge.

Speaker A: I think it's really interesting you mentioned the comparison between video as well, because 10 years ago I was in Amazon at the launch of, um, prime video in the UK and in Europe actually. And we were having conversations about that then because the options were we were calling it TVOD because that would be transactional video on demand and then SVOD subscription and then avod, which was, um, know uh, advertising. So it sounds like you're thinking in the similar sort of model there between sort of the, the individual subscription versus the uh. Are you thinking about advertising at all as well?

Speaker B: Advertising for me is probably something that it sounds great um, as a concept but you need a significant machine behind you to generate the advertising interest and advertisers are quite specific around where they want to go and I think for me at this stage and I might have a different view in five years time, I want my user experience to be uncluttered. I don't pop ups appearing in my app and people getting distracted and turning them off and getting frustrated. So for me uh, I think the thing I would like to do is make the product more convenient for users and um, that's for product offering as opposed to advertising. For me.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's the one thing with advertising is like even in the video world I think few places other than maybe YouTube have found a good way of actually getting adverts to work in a, a uh, more digital world I guess.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, it's very true. I mean the comparison I've got as an NCP and we thought great, we'll do adverts on a back of tickets. So you're naturally thinking, hey McDonald's, Costa, they're all going to want to advertise. Hairdressers are going to come in their bucket loads to you know, come into our shop. The reality was, you know, it didn't generate, I can't say the figures for confidentiality reasons but what I will say to you, it was, it wasn't a lot of money and so we abandoned that as a kind of construction. Now if you think back then NCP were probably doing something like I don't know, 70 million ticket pools and uh, we couldn't get advertising to work. Uh, and so for Ringa, whilst we have a higher throughput than that today, I think the problem still persists in as much as that trying to find a relevant category would involve significant cost and we should focus on what we do better best which is making payments easy.

Speaker C: You mentioned user experience and stuff like that, making it seamless how much time and energy really goes into, to the user experience of the app itself. That's the world that I'm in, you know, building, building apps and user experience. And so are you, are you quite meticulous with, with the development of your app? Are you updating it consistently? Um, what's the, what's the sort of situation over that side of things?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean we're Releasing roughly every two weeks. Minor, ah, improvements, big improvements. Um, so it's, it's a real big focus for us. M We're using backend analytical tools to look at where people are breaking in the journey. So I know, for example we had a particular issue on our payment, um, flow where people were breaking out and registration, um, and what we found was that people, we were originally collecting your user information, payment information and proceeding to park. And what we found was that people were breaking there. So we changed the flow so that it was user information being your, you know, we've got your mobile number anyway, but password, credentials, vehicle details, pay to park and then you register your card because people felt that was a natural flow. So we found that out. This is years ago just from analytics, uh, of changing the flow. So we look very regularly, uh, our uh, strong points and weak points and we find, tweak it. And then if we do a release into the App Store, we'll do a uh, 1%, 2% user base, see what happens on the stats, let it run for a bit and if we see a uh, breakout or a reduction in successful parking sessions going through, then we'll roll it back and see what we should do differently. So we really pay close attention to that experience because we've only got you for a moment and if you don't like it, you won't stay with us.

Speaker C: M It was so long ago now when I was using these apps, but it was true, I think, I'm not just saying it, but I think I was thankful when I saw a Ringo thing because I was like, I got the app, I know the app and it's a consistent experience. But I remember just being put off if it's like, oh God, it's this one or whatever it was.

Speaker A: Or I've got to use a machine.

Speaker C: Or I've got to use a machine. Yeah. Or speak to someone, you know. So then, because that is your. That's in effect the company that runs the company. That's the experience, the whole, the backbone of the experience, isn't it really? So, uh, it's important that we get this right. And I'm seeing it a lot. I think I sent a tweet out today about there's just so many terrible experiences being released. You know, people aren't paying a lot of attention to it. And you, if you want that seamless, you've got to do the research, you've got to look at your analytics and test new things and see if you can make it more and more seamless.

Speaker B: So yeah, most definitely. And you've got to think about the kind of the repeat user experience. You know, if you're a regular commuter. One of the things we've done, we've made it easy for you to in effect go back to your last session, uh, and park that. But having to go through the whole input process. So we're looking at both. How do we deal with the one offs you come in two or three times a year and uh, that's gotta be simple because you're not gonna remember the experience. But equally if you're a regular user, you don't necessarily wanna have to go through the booking flow, um, that you would as a new user or certainly someone who's not familiar with the app. Um, so we kind of identified two types of user flows to make that more simplified. Uh, and the same with our B2B offering, we've simplified the payment flow on that so that it's much easier for a B2B customer to park than it would be if you're a B2C because of the way we change the payment flows.

Speaker A: So I'm curious, how does it work on the other side? Because we've talked about like the customer side of things, but how does it work on like the parking attendant side of things? What do they see? Do they use a Ringo app as well?

Speaker B: Yes, they don't use a Ringo app. What happens is, um, we have a backend integration into enforcement software providers. So if you look at the parking market ecosystem, you um, kind of got us at the front end along with Pandisplay Machines etc, where in effect um, we're pushing parking sessions through to middleware. And that part of the middleware is run by back office enforcement software vendors who in effect tend to direct to the councils or to private operators for their business. And then what will happen is when a traffic warden goes along to check a vehicle number plate, if they don't see a uh, paper ticket in the window, then they'll do a call to our service through the enforcement software provider and that will pull back all the valid sessions that will give you a list of number plates and the expiry time.

Speaker A: Uh, so that's interesting. So um, I don't think you've got a public API because I did have a look. But you've got like a private API for backend integration then?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And is that uh, is that a sort of a real time API or is that some. I mean I'm curious about how you have that set up.

Speaker B: Yeah, so it's Either a push or a pull integration, depending on the, uh, preference of other partners that we work with. So on a push integration, as soon as the session starts, we're just pushing sessions down to that back end and they're logged in their database. Then if there's an update to a session because you extend the time, then we'll update the record. The other methodology is a pool where in effect, every time they do a refresh on their enforcement device, that will bring back the latest sessions onto the device. And if there's no connectivity, it will say there's no connectivity, so they know to do it again.

Speaker A: That's interesting. So, I mean, if you're not having any, um, interaction, then other than providing an API, providing an endpoint, I guess, you know, the traffic warden is using their own software. Is that almost a gap in the customer experience? Potentially, because it's going to be a very negative point if you're going to get a ticket.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I think if it wasn't working, we'd have loads of people complaining about the service and they'd abandon it because they'd be getting parking tickets. So we have regular, uh, pings or the service to make sure both services are up. So monitoring the uptime of both us and the provider, and they're doing the same to make sure that we're still live and available. So the world has moved on significantly. If you look at enforcement, uh, how it worked 12, 13 years ago, they didn't have GPS devices, they had a transponder card in the window. And, uh, it was in fact a whitelist which they had to then call down upon. So it was a really clunky process to today with the kind of data packets that are out there that doesn't exist. And I think as well, the software that the enforcement providers are having to use or the traffic waters are using has to also be compliant with the TMA Act. Um, and that's legislation around how you do and don't issue a parking fine. Um, so it's got to go through a series of steps and processes to issue that parking fine. Now, we're not in the business of issuing fines or generating those tickets. We're trying to make the payment side easier. So we kind of leave that specialism of parking enforcement software to those specialists because there's a whole process that flows from the back of that as well, not just the actual calling of our service to generate a, uh, yes, no valid response on the parking action.

Speaker A: Is there anything that you try and do to sort of help your Customers avoid getting a parking fine though. How do you approach that then?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we have a SMS reminder service that we offer, um, so we charge anything between 10 and 20p usually depending on the, you know, the territory and the contract for you to get a reminder and that will be sent to you 10 minutes before your session expires saying your parking is about to expire. So we proactively do that um, as a service that we offer and probably, you know I would say probably but again I won't give away percentage figures but it's a large number of people take those reminders from us um, to make sure they don't get the parking fine because for them you know, Tempe versus say a 40, 60 pound fine is a big saving.

Speaker C: How come that isn't done through notifications of the app then? Because that's something that the apps offer, right, is just notifications.

Speaker B: I don't know about you but I've turned all my push notifications off with the exception of BBC News. Um, the reason being I get inundated with notifications, you know, so it might be my taxi app saying come back and see us again. It might be WhatsApp family group going a bit crazy. So I, I largely ignore those notifications and a lot of people turn notifications off on their devices but SMS always comes through. So you've got that evidence and as well if you should, you know, have a challenge and say, well look, had parts, I've got a confirmation here, I've got a reminder here. You know, you've got that information to give you that uh, kind of confidence that you know where you're at. Whereas some notifications just disappear off your phone once you click on them. So you're stuffed. So I think the reason we continue to provide SMS isn't because we don't do push, it's because that's what our users have asked us for.

Speaker A: So I'm also a user of your uh, long term sessions as well. So I have my uh, car parked outside on a 12 month permit. How do you deal with that in comparison to the regular on street parking? Is it a slightly different system? Because I know I have to book it through the web rather than through the mobile app and actually part of the reason for asking the previous questions, the notification that it's about to expire is somewhat different.

Speaker B: Yeah, it is, yeah. I think the, the permit product um, is a different offering. It is part of something that we provide to market and it's very much a supporting product. What we've done there. And the reason you're going through the website would be twofold and depending on the permit type you've got. But invariably where you have a permit there's usually an eligibility criteria. We have to provide proofs and upload documents and sometimes there's a backend approval from the parking operator to say yes you can have that permit type. So that whole kind of workflow process isn't well suited to apps. You know, it suits kind of a web based program. Uh, so that's why that's done through a website at the moment. Now we do have what are called resident visitor vouchers which are short term parking. But once you've applied through eligibility you can then go and buy those as you draw them down through the app. But in terms of the longer term sessions, um, there just tends to be more workflow around it and templates that go out and emails, et cetera. So it's done through a web based application where you need to read things and see things much cleaner on your screen than you can on a phone.

Speaker A: Yeah, that Resident Visitor 1 works really well actually in my experience. The one I have had a problem with um, is my own uh, sort of residence permit because I'm not sure about the renewal process. So in terms of how you get notified, I think you get notified in a different way. You'll be able to correct me I'm sure. But I think without fail I've lived in the same place using that product for at least three or four years. Um, I have had a ticket every year when it's expired.

Speaker B: It might be you've not got reminders set on your account so you need to have a look at your account. If you've got them turned off then you won't get it for the permits. But um, what tends to happen? Again it depends who the operator is. You tend to get an email notification, come out t minus 30 then t minus 14, t being the transaction, you know, endpoint. Um, so that's what tends to happen. So I think we probably take this one offline so you don't tell your users where you live. But we can probably have a look at that for you and we can see what's going on.

Speaker A: Well, I'd like to make a feature request for an auto renew function. If I'm honest,

Speaker C: Chris is a question to you then why did you go with Ringo as opposed to contacting the local authority? Is it the only option or is it just a headache that Ringo have just made that super simple for you? Other than the auto renewing?

Speaker A: I'm not sure. I mean, Peter will probably be able to answer this better than I can, but I'm not sure in my borough, which obviously we'll take offline. Um, I think originally it was, this is, um, a new option and now I think it might be the only option.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, you know, local authorities and private operators have kind of moved away from sort of the 25, 30 people sat in an office processing bits of paper. So I would imagine that might well be the case. There might still be an over the counter option for you. But, um, I think from a convenience perspective, you don't really want to be walking into the council or posting documents off, then waiting 10 days for it to come back. I think the beauty of the online permits is you can get them pretty much depending on the rules from the council almost instantaneously. Once, uh, you go in to purchase

Speaker A: it, is that something that you then feed back then experiences like I've just told you about the auto renew issue, is that something that, um, you feed back to the councils to say, look, this is something we're experiencing? How often do they listen?

Speaker B: No, they do, the council do listen. In fairness, you know, I think an example being, uh, we had a scenario where the council were not approving renewal permits without new proofs being applied. So what we did in that scenario, we spoke to them about it and we did an audit and looked at what was going on. And, you know, I think something like 85% of people reapplying for permits hadn't changed address. So they introduced an auto renewal function. Just said, hey, tick here. If address hasn't changed, tick here, tick here. And then what we built from was a random audit checker. So it would sweep across X percent of the volume of permits. It was an automated routine and identify from those proofs that have been supplied whether they were still in the same location. So you still supplied your proofs, but the council were, uh, doing auto approval and then going back and checking latterly. So you didn't have this delay between renewal and you get a new permit.

Speaker A: So over the, over the period that you've been operating, working with these local authorities and actually all of the car parks across the country, do you think that you've been able to help move attitudes from the sort of more traditional suppliers or, um, vendors or councils through this sort of reuse of data that you're talking about?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, you know, just on a data point, you kind of, uh, took the words out my mouth, I think the big thing that digitalization has done is provide accurate data points. Okay. And we're capturing as part of our service the emissions of your vehicle, your fuel types, etc, so any one time we can sort of say to a local authority as part of an account review, look, you've got a particular challenge around pollution. We can see that you've got lots of diesel vehicles parking in the borough at this time of night or this particular area. Why don't you look at adjusting your charging policy and try and encourage green vehicles. So we've been quite instrumental working with a number of boroughs, primarily in London, but also a couple in Kent where we've implemented net zero parking or green parking. And what we're doing there is we're offering differential tariffs to our uh, end users in conjunction with the council's, you know, approval on their tariff policy based on the emissions of vehicles. So they're using that data to drive out sound decisions. They can also use the data to look at general traffic, you know, and space availability. Because a lot of time is spent just going around in circles, navigating, looking for a parking space. If you're not familiar with an area,

Speaker A: very familiar with that, with that, um, driving around looking for parking.

Speaker B: We've got space availability in our products. So um, if you go into the map view, um, which most, a lot of people don't use actually, but if you go into the map view you can see a traffic light system. It works 90% of the time. Um, so you know where to find available space. And what's driving that out is data points. So both the end user is benefiting from it, but also the council benefiting from it because they can drive policy and pricing based on utilization and also vehicle types.

Speaker A: Ah, uh, that's interesting. So that sort of takes us back to the uh, tros that you were talking about before of actually setting the tariffs. So you're kind of able to provide that information back to them to help them make an informed decision about what those tariffs should be.

Speaker B: I presume there is an element of that, but also I think, you know, you might have a particular high street that's struggling and they might be saying, for example, that the reason it's struggling is parking duration isn't long enough, um, because it might be a maximum 20 minute stay, for example. And then what we can do is say, okay, well let's play with this a little bit and look at the data points. So if we made it an hour stay, what happens? So we change the tariff to make it an hour and we see a people still parking for 20 minutes or they park for 40 minutes. So you can start to test assumptions based on that digitalization of the parking. Right. Because you know how long people are paying to park for.

Speaker C: Given that the local authorities can change and update their processes and all the rest of it, how much legwork do you need to be doing behind the scenes and whatever because of local authorities? Oh, we work with a local authority and they have this one edge case scenario which hasn't been built into our system. We've got to now build that into our system. Is there a lot of legwork that goes into this?

Speaker B: The answer to your question, if you'd have asked me this question 10 years ago, I said there's quite a few. But I think today with the platform being so advanced and our presence in market, it's very, very rare. We can't accommodate a tariff construct. So 99% of what we do is run run rate. So we get, given the information, we translate it straight into our system and it gets uploaded and verified. And that process can take anything from 20 minutes, you know, for a handful of zones to maybe a day for a wider cluster of zones. Um, but nowadays, you know, our tariff module is very advanced. Um, so we don't really come up against those corner cases anymore.

Speaker A: And. Sorry, did you say before that the service fee that you charge is a fixed fee on top of the tariffs?

Speaker B: That's correct, yeah. It's a convenience, it's a flat rate, it varies by each authority. And that's because of the tender construct and tender market. If I had my way, and it's an open market, um, then I would like to move to maybe a percentage model. Um, because then if you're parking with a lower tariff duration, you wouldn't pay as much as someone parking with a higher tariff duration, relatively speaking.

Speaker A: So I'm curious as well, have there been any particular on this journey that you've been on, have there been any, like, real difficulties, any real failures that you've gone through?

Speaker B: I mean, I think in any world there is, you know, bumps on a company's journey.

Speaker A: Um, any that spring to mind?

Speaker B: Yeah, we had a go at trying, uh, to get into the, the peer to peer marketplace. So we've got a competitor out there just park, who have done a great job in, um, monetizing driveway resales.

Speaker A: Of course.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So we, we had a crack at that and we arrived in market too late. Um, so I think for me, um, that was probably in terms of strategic direction one with hindsight. We probably shouldn't have gone into there

Speaker A: been any major successes that you know, have really sort of helped to elevate the company and take it on to that next growth point.

Speaker B: Mhm. I think for us, you know, the major success has really been I think a combination. It's a crass thing to say but really it's the people. You know, we've had a great retention policy. Um, we've kept most of our staff over the years. Um, we bring in lots of new blood bringing people in from universities on either internships or graduate programs. So you know a big success for us has been how we bring new talent in but also continue to evolve the product from a kind of pure product perspective. I think our B, Uh2B offering that we launched been a great success for us. It's helped us to grow the fleet side of our organization. Um, so we've got a small team now that's focused on selling that side of our organization or business offering and that's been a huge success. The greatest thing I think we've done to change the market was probably the emission based parking program that we launched back in 2009, um, which initially went live in London borough Richmond, um, with a liberal um, government in power. And then the uh, conservative government lobbied against that program, which is quite ironic, um, saying it's a tax on the, on the motorist. So it was scrapped. And then we found ourselves in 2017 when emissions became, you know, a real focus on the uh, political agenda that we're able to just dust off our emission based parking program. And that's really helped, you know, drive us in terms of, you know, the marketplace. But also in Europe where we received several awards for that and have been commended on the uh, strides you've made to help local authorities focus on, you know, keeping their cities more livable, cleaner and healthier for their residents and visitors.

Speaker A: One final question, which might be a bit of a silly one. The Beatles are known for being quite litigious. Has Ringo Starr been in contact?

Speaker B: No, no, I think he's uh, no longer around to ask the question. But um, we've done okay on that front. But thank you for the question.

Speaker A: If you're trying to suggest that Ringo Starr's dead, that's news I haven't heard. But uh, I think he's away in the, in the U.S. isn't he? I was curious as soon as I saw it years and years ago when the name appeared, I was like, that's strange. As a big Beatles fan.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think the Name Ringo, it comes from, you know, you ring and go. So it's back where it first began over a phone as opposed to an app.

Speaker C: Actually. Are there any plans to change that? Because of course it's, it's still on the phone, but ringing and all that vernacular is disappearing as the youth don't, uh, even know what, uh, that is. Holding your thumb to your ear and your pinky to your mouth sort of thing, you know. Any ambitions to change the name or any inkling that you might have to.

Speaker B: At the moment, no. The brand is well embedded in the psyche of our users. So I think it would be probably rather foolhardy of me to change that brand, um, unless there's a bigger gameplay happening above my head. But at the moment, no, there's no plans to change the brand. That might change in the future, but right now, certainly the next two to three years, I don't see that changing at all.

Speaker A: Well, the car phone warehouse is still surviving and doing well, isn't it? So, you know.

Speaker B: No.

Speaker C: Is it? I thought it closed down.

Speaker A: Oh, well, there we go then. They survive for a long time after car phones, I think, anyway. I think that's probably, uh, a note on which we can draw it to a close. Is there anything, uh, final you want to leave us with, Peter? I mean, what's that, what's the future for Ringo, aside from, uh, aside from the sort of democratized parking that we talked about?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think the future for Ringo is really more product evolution. Um, I think we'll see more services coming into our app in the next two to five years. Um, and to support that and underpin that, we need this kind of open market democratization to happen, um, so that A, we can invest in it, but B, make it relevant to our users.

Speaker A: All right, well, thank you very much for joining us. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.

Speaker C: Yeah, thanks. It was great.

Speaker B: Thank you very much.

Speaker C: Great episode, that one, and a fantastic, fun one to end on. So from the bottoms of our hearts, this is that tech show, the show that reveals the magicians behind the magic that is everyday technology. You have been absolutely wonderful. So for everyone here at that tech

Speaker A: show, don't forget to like and subscribe and support us now. I'm, uh, only joking. That's it. We've done it now, so it's fine.

Speaker C: See you later.

Speaker A: See you Goodby.