Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with Smart Parking (ASX:SPZ), CEO Paul Gillespie
Lel Smits: Smart Parking has delivered a record FY26 with its proprietary technology and AI capabilities playing an increasingly important role in scaling the business across global markets. The company is expanding its automatic number plate recognition platform across the UK, US, Germany and other markets while continuing to develop new AI-powered products. I’m joined today by Smart Parking CEO Paul Gillespie to discuss the company’s technology transformation, AI opportunity and growth outlook.
Paul, welcome to the Stock Network.
Paul Gillespie: Hello, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to have you on.
Lel Smits: And look, Smart Parking’s proprietary smart cloud AI engine is now processing hundreds of millions of images, helping to improve number plate recognition, also automate parking management. Can you explain to us how AI has changed the way Smart Parking operates in the context of also just having delivered record FY26 results?
Paul Gillespie: Sure. Yeah, absolutely.
I guess it’s a journey we’ve been on for the last few years, and I guess it starts really in our technology development team and utilising AI tools to make sure we can write code, write it quickly, write a significant amount and develop our smart cloud platform at scale and do it quickly and deliver results to the operating businesses. So that’s really the key element is where it started. But from there, because we’re incredibly data rich organisation and lots of transactions on a daily basis, whether it be payments, whether it be people online being in touch with us, talking to us about their PBNs or their breach notices and appeals basis.
So we’ve employed multiple levels of AI tools around just a general chat bot, for example, on our appeals website to direct people or triage these appeals in the right direction, but also getting the appeals to be answered through the AI tool as well. So that’s had an impact in our back office. But also in our marketing, in our online presence, they’re utilising AI across multiple levels of just trying to reach out and contact with potential customers, but also dealing with existing customers and trying to deal with the motorists and make that journey much quicker.
So it starts really with the technology in the building and developing and doing that at scale and allowing us to really deliver business or quantifiable outcomes to our operational businesses and then taking that on to their customers. So it’s a multi-level approach. And that’s absolutely had an impact on our clearly our back office, our cost base.
And as you highlighted or alluded to, record results this year, which is a number of years in the making and running at a CAGR of 44% growth in revenue over the last five years. So it’s something we’re going to be continuing to grow, continue to look at and employ more tools as we go forward. Now, moving on from that, you have continued to develop Smart Vision, Smart Cloud Hub, also your new parking app.
Lel Smits: How is smart parking really transforming from this traditional parking operator into a technology-led platform? And also, how do you think this will support your future growth?
Paul Gillespie: Well, I guess I’ll take the second bit first. How does it support our future growth? Really, you have to be different and offer something to the customer that is going to be unique and offer value. You’ve got to keep adding value to their operation, whether that be the landowner that we ultimately contract to, to run their parking facilities.
But then how do we look after their customers? How do we look after the end user, the motorist? So making payments easy through the application is clearly number one, right? From there, taking the customer on a journey in order to allow them to give, as in our customer, give them more information about what’s happening on their locations, the Hub is a fantastic tool. The amount of feedback we get from when we do customer visits or the customer success team is visiting through account management or regular account management meetings. The feedback we get around the Hub is phenomenal.
They know what’s going on at any one time. They can see how many cars come and go from their car park through the Hub. It’s a live dashboard.
They can see the average dwell time. They can understand how many payments have been made. They can manage their white listing or their exemption listing to ensure that some of their staff or permit holders or key customers don’t actually run into getting a breach or getting a PBN sent to them.
So it’s multiple layers of information that they never had before. And when you’re dealing with a retailer or a QSR owner, a McDonald’s franchisee or something, the whole customer journey for them starts when they arrive at the car park. So now they have that extra piece of information, which we give them, which they never had before.
That’s a real value add. And that to us, again, is continuous improvements, continually adding more value to our customer so they can make their customer life better or easier. And that’s the way we view it.
So that can be through payments, through the Hub, through a number of different areas of the end user experience that we provide.
Lel Smits: Yes. And Paul, in terms of your global growth opportunity, you’re expanding across major markets, including the U.S. and Germany, with technology really helping the company scale its operations. Where do you see the biggest opportunities from here, really, for growth?
Paul Gillespie: Well, clearly, if we look at the markets we’re in today, we have these established markets like the UK and New Zealand, which continue to grow and grow very well and growing at scale. If you look at our results today, you can see that they’ve grown phenomenally well. But clearly, the growth engines, the two addressable markets, which are the largest opportunity, as you highlight, is the U.S. and Germany.
Now, we’ve done two acquisitions in the last 18 months in the U.S. So clearly, it’s a favored area for capital deployment. And we are looking very closely at that and how we can scale, because our technology is different there. A lot of U.S. competitors rely on legacy solutions to provide these systems to their end user clients.
And that is dated. And what we provide is something different. And we are differentiating ourselves across multiple areas of the U.S. with our technology, with our approach, with our know-how and deep domain expertise.
So really, the U.S. is a massive opportunity. But we have this other market, Germany, which has got a huge addressable market for us to attack. And again, we can be different.
And that’s what we look for. Can we be different? Have we got something unique that the current market needs? And we can really provide some value. And that’s what we’re doing in those areas.
Lel Smits: Paul, thank you so much for the update from Snotpak. And congratulations on your record results and all the best for the growth ahead. Thank you.
Paul Gillespie: Thanks for having me.
Ends