Companies news Open sesame Leeds City Council is the first local authority to benefit from an award-winning parking innovation from ParkBee and RingGo. The council is opening up new spaces and generating income from an existing barriered parking site on Swinegate, which is accessed only via the RingGo cashless parking app. This winning solution from the Parkex 2018 Innovation Trail enables the council to allow the public also to use a staff-only car park. ParkBees technology lets motorists enter at the touch of a button, and be charged automatically for the time they stay. Subsidiaries sale Indigo Group has announced the sale of non-core European subsidiaries, following its geographical repositioning strategy. The leading car parking and mobility group concluded the sale of its subsidiaries in the UK, Germany, Czech Republic and Slovakia to SABA Infraestructuras. All four countries accounted for less than six per cent of the 2017 EBITDA of the group. JustPark success JustPark has been crowned Innovator of the Year at the Amazon #GrowingBusinessAwards for its predictive availability tool. It lets drivers find out their likelihood of being able to park. Latest developments from organisations across the profession Q-Park loyalty card gives shoppers a boost A revolutionary new app is aiming to bring parking and retailers into much closer partnership in a bid to drive footfall in towns and cities. Customers using the new Q-Park Rewards app register their bank cards and pay for their parking using the card. Q-Park tracks the payments and gives a percentage as cashback into a mobile wallet. Once the customer reaches certain milestones, they can redeem directly into their bank account to offset the cost of parking or exhange for retail gift vouchers. And customers do not just earn cashback from spending with Q-Park they can also earn from retail and restaurant partners. If the customer uses their registered card in places such as Debenhams, Waitrose, Jack Wills, Prezzo and others, their spend will also be added to their mobile wallet. This means customers are essentially paying for their parking by shopping on the high street. John Denton, head of sales and marketing, said: Q-Park is passionate about creating value both to customers and to the wider business community. This new loyalty scheme allows us to achieve this goal and really add value to our customers while collaborating with our neighbouring retailers. Were delighted to yet again bring cutting-edge technology to the parking industry. Q-Park operates in locations including Birmingham, Cardiff, Croydon, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and London. Striking new build for NCP NCP has completed its latest new-build multi-storey car park at The English Cities Fund New Bailey development in Salford. The striking Stanley Street car park will bring 633 new spaces to the development, and is NCPs third car park in the area. It uses energy-efficient LED lighting and is fitted with six electric vehicle charging points, along with 20 wide bays to meet the diverse needs of customers. As NCP continues to strive to improve the customer experience at all of its car parks, all technology available in the Stanley Street car park is connected to NCPs dedicated Customer Contact Centrebased in Manchester. This meansthat any faults in the equipment will be self-detected and resolved quickly, helping give customers a more seamless parking experience. Adam Robson, head of new builds at NCP, said: We have seen ever-increasing demand within the region and are committed to meeting this through our wider portfolio-expansion strategy whereby we are looking to double the number of car parks within our estate. NCP is also working with Greater Anglia to roll out automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology across 20 railway station car parks, giving customers greater control over how and when they pay for their parking. This follows NCPs successful implementation of the technology across Transport for Londons estate in 2016. The ticketless ANPR technology will allow customers to pay for their parking online anytime up until midnight the day after their visit on the Greater Anglia Parking Portal (gaparking.co.uk). * Meanwhile, NCP has made a series of appointments to its property team. Nick Gravells returns to NCP to take on the role of head of property asset management. Adam Robson has been appointed head of new build property development, and Rhys Jones as head of new site acquisitions. 10 britishparking.co.uk PNFeb19 pp10-15 Companies News.indd 10 23/01/2019 12:41 JGB60