Liège, Verviers and Anderlecht launch
the SMS parking service

There are now as many as 20 towns offering a pay-by-SMS car parking system across Belgium. Antwerp, the first town in Belgium to launch this service, registered its five millionth transaction this week.

Already widely established in Flanders, the SMS parking service continues to spread in Wallonia and Brussels. The cities of Liège, Verviers and Anderlecht have just chosen Mobile-for, the Belgacom subsidiary specialised in mobile payments, to equip their parking ticket machines with the SMS Parking system.

In total, there are therefore as many as 20 towns which now offer this innovative solution that makes it possible to pay for a parking space by sending an SMS message to the short number 4411.

For the whole of 2010, more than 2.8
million parking sessions were paid by
SMS.

To start a parking session the user sends an SMS message with a structured message containing the number of the parking terminal and their license plate number to the short number, 4411. To end a session, the users sends “Q” by SMS to 4411.

Better still, those who have a mobile phone running the Android operating system can use a mobile application that is even more user-friendly (name of the application: SMS 4411).

Users therefore only pay for the exact duration of the parking session and can choose whether the amount should be added to their mobile bill, deducted from their Pay&Go card credit (for Proximus customers), or placed on a separate bill containing a history of their parking sessions.

Practically, the service will be available to users before the summer: in Verviers (1,770 parking places), followed by Liège (4,800 parking places) and Anderlecht (4,000 parking places).

The success of the 4411 SMS parking service motivated the Belgacom Group to develop its mobile payment strategy within its wholly-owned subsidiary, Mobile-For. I March 2009, the Group decided to combine all mobile payment projects under the PingPing brand created for this purpose.

Its aim is to make it possible for mobile phone users to pay for their small, everyday purchases that they make online or elsewhere, thereby making life easier for them.
As a reminder, PingPing also offers payment solutions for snack bars, major distribution outlets, company restaurants, vending machines, not to mention online purchases.