Sun, Snow & Storms

Welcome to this latest CEO update, coming to you from flight VJ86 between Sydney and Saigon, where I'm about to attend an Australian trade mission to Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi with eight other?companies seeking to launch their?products and services in Vietnam. For the thousands of you who follow KERB regularly on LinkedIn, I hope these updates continue to give you insights into some of the diverse and exciting projects the KERB team, its Advisory Board and its channel partners are working on across four continents.

Parking Stories from a Post-COVID World

The past three months have seen KERB’s Executive team attend business and partner meetings in the UK, the USA, Canada, Portugal, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Three common themes have emerged from these meetings:

1. A full return to work in this post-COVID world is happening much more slowly than anticipated: many workers are commuting to the office just one, two, or three days a week. Where, in a pre-COVID world, most office car parks were full Monday to Friday, those same car parks are now half-empty. This has unlocked an opportunity for commercial buildings - using KERB’s booking, access, and payments technology - to make their empty parking spaces available to a cost-sensitive general public seeking hourly or daily parking in the city. KERB automatically verifies who drivers are, lets them in, and collects their parking fee before they exit - all from the convenience of the person’s phone.
2. Having survived 2020-2021 with dramatically lower parking revenues, many property owners and operators are looking for creative ways to reduce operating expenses and capital expenditures. That KERB’s technology lets them automate many traditional aspects of running a car park, without the need to replace legacy car park equipment, has generated much interest. (Why replace our old gates when we can get an extra few years out of them using KERB? Why issue plastic RFID access cards to tenants and visitors when they can just use the KERB app to enter and exit? Why employ a 3rd party parking enforcement company, when KERB’s ‘Attendant’ features show us exactly what we need to know about who should - or shouldn’t - be in our car park(s) today?)
3. The “EV revolution” is taking?longer than anticipated. Electric vehicle charging infrastructure represents a significant cost that many landlords and parking operators are unable to justify in the current economic climate. For KERB - which solves the driver access/screening/payment challenges for buildings with EV chargers in their car parks - parking electric vehicles represents a longer-term opportunity. In the meantime, there are over 1.5 billion non-electric vehicles that need parking almost every day…

New KERB Sites on Three Vastly Different Continents

In the last eight weeks, KERB has gone live in new car parks in Sydney, Hobart, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, and Edmonton. While each of these sites varies enormously in functionality - commuter car parks next to train stations, office towers, sports centers, ski resorts, airport FBOs, etc - each parking site has its own environmental challenges. From 44-degree heatwaves in Sydney to minus-44-degree winters in Edmonton, to the torrential daily monsoon rains that hit KERB’s parking sites in South-East Asia from July to October, ‘extreme weather’ is often a major consideration - especially now that many KERB sites have ALPR (automatic license-plate recognition) cameras and IoT KERB Boxes attached to a building’s own parking equipment. Heavy rain, snow, and dirty license plates affect an ALPR camera’s ability to read a vehicle’s plate properly. Fortunately, KERB has three backup plans for adverse weather conditions: a button inside the KERB app which allows legitimate parkers to automatically open a barrier and finish a booking session; (optional) QR codes at the entry and exit gates, which allow a driver to scan-to-open; and digital kiosks which let drivers pay and exit without their phone. You’d think that parking is pretty much the same in most countries; nothing could be further from the truth!

New Product Features

KERB’s Product and Engineering teams are working around the clock to deliver new features faster. In the past three months, KERB has launched its new feature-rich ‘Attendant’ app, which lets 3rd-party parking enforcement companies:

• See exactly which vehicles should be parking now;?
• See a vehicle’s parking infringement history;?
• Open a barrier for drivers encountering problems;
• Start and finish a KERB booking session.?

We have also launched a simpler ’app-less’ booking flow for high-volume car parks in which a high percentage of parkers need to park with or without the KERB app on their phone. For our partner organizations which use KERB’s B2B software 'Bays?' to lower the cost of their parking operations, we are about to launch a re-vamped Bays? interface, making it easier to find, sort, and edit your customer’s bookings.

Thank you for following KERB, on our journey to deliver a touch-less parking experience worldwide. Please reach out at any time with?any questions about how KERB?can help your?organization turn a?20th-century car-parking experience into a 21st-century,?mobile-first, data-driven customer success story. We're here to help...

Until the next update in January 2024, stay safe over the festive season, and consider KERB next time you need to park - no matter where that might be...

Rob Brown

KERB CEO