take advantage of the transformative nature of ... simply a âdigital credit cardâ and instead offer increased value,
The Future of Mobile PLL Payments By Andrew K irk , Vice President of Sales & Mark eting, Cit ySourced
THE PROMISE OF MOBILE
W
e believe that simply building a mobile version of a website misses the promise of mobile te c h n olo g y. O u r goal is to
ta ke a dva nt a ge o f t h e t ra n s fo r mat ive n atu re o f mobile — phones are location aware, have cameras, and an expanding array of payment technology, such as near field communication (NFC) and fingerprint security. In addition, mobile usage continues to grow at astonishing rates. According to Flurry Analytics, a mobile analytics company, overall app usage grew by 58% year over year in 2015. 1 Despite this rapid growth in mobile usage, a de facto standard for mobile payments has yet to emerge. According to a survey carried out in February 2016, U.S. Internet users were asked which mobile payment applications they had used to purchase a product in store. The most commonly used mobile payment app (Android Pay) only accounted for 18% of the market while
Apple Pay represented 11% of respondents’ usage over the previous year. 2
MOBILE PAYMENTS TRENDING UP This new technology presents opportunities and challenges for municipalities searching for methods to collect on additional revenue sources, while also fulfilling a growing constituent need. Mobile payment is novel and niche at the moment, but it is an area of finance that is destined to grow. According to a recent Accenture survey, as reported by Forbes, while 52% of North Americans are “extremely aware” of mobile payments, only 18% use them on a regular basis. Unsurprisingly, millennials and higher-income households lead the pack with 23% and 38% using contactless payments at least once a week, respectively. 3 Mobile payment adoption will grow in part because of increased opportunities as local merchants continue to adopt the point-of-sale technology required to support such payments; however, those organizations that can go beyond simply a “digital credit card” and instead offer increased value, such as coupons, loyalty rewards, or discounts, will dramatically drive mobile payment adoption. Cutting-edge municipal organizations will begin to apply these economic tools towards constituent behavior.
PARTNER COMMUNITY
app and is shared with others in your community, which drives foot traffic back to your garage sale, and drives better user adoption of getting a garage sale permit in the first place. True mobile technology means adding new value, which means more revenue can be collected.
THE NEXT STEPS
Figure 1: U.S. mobile payment app usage 2016 statistics: Despite the rapid growth in mobile usage, there is no single mobile payment solution with significant adoption by the average mobile user in the U.S.
TAKING THE FIRST MOBILE STEP
Cityworks PLL has been built using the most modern of software architectures, which includes web services and a very robust API, thus making it possible to add mobile functionality to PLL for citizen-facing apps. CitySourced provides the mobile platform as a service that allows cities like Longview and Salt Lake City to provide one master app for their citizens. In the next iteration, innovative partners and municipalities will build applications, which harness these platforms, to develop the cutting-edge apps that allow mobile payments and PLL to work together seamlessly.
We are in the early stages of this process, but we have already seen Cityworks customers such as Salt Lake City, Utah, and Longview, Texas, begin the process of pushing payments into their CitySourced mobile apps for activities such as paying water bills and traffic tickets. By leveraging a single master app for their citizens, these municipalities provide a single mobile channel for the public and avoid having to promote and support multiple public-facing smartphone apps—avoiding app sprawl is the goal.
CONNECTING MOBILE PAYMENTS TO PLL Moving forward, the license and permitting experience will evolve to support mobile payments. For example, accessing the camera on your phone will allow you to easily add photos to a pet permit application or to receive a push notification to alert you in real time that there has been a change to your time-sensitive commercial application. In particular, there is functionality that, when designed specifically for mobile, provides a simpler and superior user experience. Imagine applying for a garage sale permit that would involve opening a mobile app, selecting the garage sale permit button, automatically transmitting your location, and confirming payment via saved payment credentials. Your garage sale is immediately added to the app. This is where it gets interesting. The next citizen to open the app can click on a button that says “garage sales near me.” Since the app knows your location, and is connected to Cityworks PLL, it can show that citizen all the nearby garage sales—including yours. There’s a value exchange happening here; your garage sale gets listed in an
Figure 2: Cityworks customers using mobile payments: Salt Lake City, Utah, and Longview, Texas, are using lightweight versions of mobile payments for water bill and traffic ticket payments.
1 “Media, Productivity & Emojis Give Mobile Another Stunning Growth Year” http:// flurrymobile.tumblr.com/post/136677391508/stateofmobile2015 2 “Which of the following mobile payment applications have you used to purchase a product in store?” http://www.statista.com/statistics/412599/ mobile-payment-us-app-usage/ 3 “How mobile payments will grow in 2016” http://fortune.com/2015/10/29 mobile-payments-grow-2016/
InPrint | Fall 2016 35
