Reino Turns on Parking Payments with Peppercoin, SunTrust

Reino Parking Systems Inc. said today it had deployed parking meters in locations around the U.S. that will accept credit card payments from either cards or mobile phones, with transactions processed through SunTrust Merchant Services LLC and Peppercoin Inc. The meters are equipped with card swipes, but users with cards on file can also pay by dialing a toll-free number and entering a meter number and payment amount. Users will also receive short-message service (SMS) text messages when their parking time is close to expiring. Parking is a mostly cash market that generates $10 billion in sub-$5 payments annually, according to Waltham, Mass.-based Peppercoin, which announced the deal with Reino last fall as part of a major effort to expand its micropayment-processing services beyond digital content to small-value transactions at physical points of sale (Digital Transactions News, Oct. 5, 2004). In related news, Peppercoin announced it had reached an agreement with SunTrust Merchant Services to market Peppercoin's gateway to merchants. The acquirer, which serves 67,000 merchants and processes $20 billion yearly in card volume, is a joint venture between SunTrust Banks Inc. and First Data Corp., with which Peppercoin also has made a processing deal. Reino is the first client to deploy Peppercoin's service through SunTrust. Earlier, Peppercoin had struck similar agreements with two other acquirers, Moneris Solutions and Chase Merchant Services, which is a joint venture between First Data and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Earlier this month, Peppercoin announced a new generation of its micropayments system, Peppercoin 3.0, that adds prepaid and subscription capability to its pay-as-you-go and post-paid transaction functions for payments ranging from a few cents up to $20 (Digital Transactions News, Feb. 2).