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How DIVVY is helping businesses navigate COVID-19

Parking Technology or Optimising bookable assets through smarter technology

There’s no doubt that the coronavirus pandemic has touched the life of every Australian and had an impact on every Australian business.  

Since the first lockdown in March, it has been a time of great change and uncertainty. As individuals and businesses, we’ve needed to draw on our resilience and adaptability.  

Here at DIVVY, we’ve been focussed on looking after our team and supporting our customers. We’ve also been finding new ways to help businesses get back to work as they navigate the new normal.  

Our car parks 

Since the pandemic took off in Australia, we’ve been working more closely than ever with our building owners and parking listers. We’ve been staying abreast of their COVID-19 policies and procedures to ensure safe and healthy car parks. 

Our Enterprise customers 

Our Enterprise system is helping businesses with vacant employee parking to increase efficiencies during COVID-19. It generates reports quickly and easily. The reports help businesses investigate whether they are eligible for a reduction in Fringe Benefits Tax or an exemption from the Parking Space Levy. Click here to read more about how your business can save on its car parking spaces during COVID-19. 

DIVVY Enterprise features like Book on Behalf and Free Up My Space allow businesses to manage changing employee parking needs as the pandemic evolves. The system uses secure cloud-based technology, so it can be operated from anywhere.  

It’s been an opportune time for our Enterprise customers with parking listed for public booking on DIVVY Marketplace. The demand for public parking is on the rise as people return to their workplaces but choose to avoid public transport. 

The contactless DIVVY pre-book parking system offers drivers peace of mind. There’s no handling of cash, pulling parking tickets, using payment machines or touching any shared surfaces at all with a pre-booked DIVVY car park.  

Optimising bookable assets through smarter technology 

For more than twelve months now, our employees have been entering and exiting our offices using contactless DIVVY access technology. 

Contactless access has never been more relevant. We’ve seen an increased focus on our technology’s ability to provide contactless access to bike lockers, end of trip facilities, meeting rooms and more. 

After witnessing the challenges faced by businesses during COVID-19, we took the booking platform technology that works so well for parking and adapted it for a range of new applications.  

Queuing and Contact Tracing Platform 

Our Queuing and Contact Tracing Platform allow any business that is visited by the public to communicate with its customers: 

  • its peak periods 
  • its busiest and quietest days 
  • in the event of queuing, the wait time to enter the venue 

The Platform makes it easy for customers to plan their visit before they leave home, helping them to avoid busy periods, save time and visit with peace of mind.  

The Platform has pre-book capabilities, enabling customers to book their visit in advance to avoid queuing. It allows businesses to control the time, duration and number of customers accessing their premises, and even manage separate areas within the venue. This helps businesses to adhere to venue capacity limits and maintain social distancing within their premises.  

Our Queuing and Contact Tracing Platform can also capture visitor contact details quickly and easily. It makes it possible to track interactions and crossovers between visitors and employees, helping with contact tracing should it be required. For those businesses conducting health attestation questionnaires, our Platform makes it quick and simple to collect and store visitors’ declarations of symptoms.  

Find out how DIVVY are helping Australian supermarket giant Woolworths take care of their customers with their Q-Tracker tool here.  

Back to Work Module 

To help businesses safely transition their staff back to their workplaces, we have launched our new Back to Work module. It allows businesses to manage how many staff will be in the workplace at any one time, as well as maintaining a digital record of staff attendance in the workplace.  

Staff use the DIVVY app to book a day and time to come into work. The booking parameters – how many staff can access the workplace, on which days and at which times – are set by the business. Just like the DIVVY parking experience, staff use a QR code on their phone for contactless entry to the workplace. 

It makes it easy for businesses to meet public health directions and comply with COVID-19 Safety Plans in their workplaces. The module has already been successfully adopted by TOGA Far East Hotels at their head office in Ultimo, Sydney.  

We are here to help. For more information, please get in touch with our friendly team at sales@divvy.com.au.   

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Parking and the Internet of Things – Grant Fowler, CEO of DIVVY

Parking and the Internet of Things can help to open boom gates as your car approaches

Picture this. It’s 7.30am on a Tuesday. You jump in the car, setting out on your commute to work. Your car or your phone provides you with a warning about an earlier accident on your usual route and guides you on a detour specially designed to avoid the banked-up traffic.

Once you arrive at the carpark, the boom gate lifts as you approach – no pull ticket or access pass necessary. Your credit card will be automatically charged based on the length of your stay and frequency of visits. You’re then directed by your car or phone to the nearest available car space, one that is guaranteed to be the right size for your big electric SUV. Getting out of the car, you approach the lift as the doors open. There’s no need to rush – the lift knew you were coming and it’s waiting for you.

This is what our mornings will soon look like, thanks to the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that describes a totally interconnected world. It’s a world where devices of every shape and size are manufactured with ‘smart’ capabilities that allow them to communicate and interact with other devices, exchange data, make autonomous decisions and perform useful tasks based on pre-set, but adaptable, conditions. It’s a world where technology will make life richer, easier, safer and more comfortable.

The Internet of Things is simply the logical next step in an evolutionary process. The fact is that the technological building blocks of the IoT—including microcontrollers, microprocessors, environmental and other types of sensors, and short range and long-range networking communications – are already in wide-spread use today.

The IoT, which provides a platform for acceleration of the rate of development of existing technologies further, simply adds one additional capability – a secured service infrastructure – to the evolving technology mix. Such an infrastructure will support the communication and remote-control capabilities that enable a wide variety of Internet-enabled devices to work together, resulting in scenarios like your commute described above. And it is big business – a study by McKinsey estimates that the IoT will contribute between $40 – $100 billion to the Australian GDP by 2025.

Life with the IoT contributes to the rise of ‘smart cities’. A smart city uses data and technology to improve the lives of the citizens and businesses that inhabit it. The ‘smart’ in smart cities is about the ability of numerous interconnected devices to collect data derived from our actions, reactions, journeys, preferences, wants and needs, the products we buy, the services we use, the places we go to and the places we don’t go to, and deliver this data to a cloud location. That data is then distributed to analysts or AI-enabled servers that process the data, draw conclusions and deliver an improved life experience back to us. 

There is no shortage of discussion on the possibilities presented by the IoT. From smart buildings to home automation, from fitness trackers to connected gyms and from info-bots at airports to border security search and discover, there are myriad ways our lives could be changed by the mass use of interconnected sensors embedded in everyday objects.

From the perspective of parking, the IoT solutions offer real benefits. Ultimately, it means that people will spend less time in cars. This will contribute to an uplift in productivity and will give people more leisure time. Fewer vehicles on the road means a reduction in traffic congestion, which means fewer accidents and less stress. It also means less pollution. Additionally, less time spent circling looking for a car park means less vehicle emissions.

So, we see that individual customers as well as the greater community benefit when parking is enhanced by the IoT. But what can the IoT offer building owners? Data. And with data comes insight. The days of installing ‘dumb’ parking access control devices are numbered. Property owners are already realising data streams about visitors to other parts of their buildings thanks to IoT integration, and they rightly expect the same level of insight from their carpark.

Car parking in the age of the IoT has the capacity to offer a rich stream of data relating to building tenants and visitors and their habits and needs. This can give our property owner customers the ability to build-to-demand and to design the buildings of the future – truly smart buildings.

As a tech-based company, DIVVY considered how to best deliver our products into the smart cities environment and soon realised that smart cities need not only best-in-class tech devices, but the connectivity that only IoT platforms can provide. We made the choice to build our complete parking access control platform and hardware management software solution in the Microsoft Azure IoT platform. Microsoft’s Azure IoT operating system provides an unprecedented level of security for IoT connected devices.

We have also released a new input / output controller built with a Microsoft Azure Sphere IoT chip included as the secure core of the device. We’re proud to say that this world-first controller was designed and developed in-house at DIVVY here in Australia. We recently released the new device at Microsoft’s IoT In Actionconference in Auckland, which we attended in conjunction with our partner Avnet, a global leader in electronic components, services and embedded solutions. DIVVY is Microsoft’s very first Australian partner to provide an IoT turn-key product with an embedded Microsoft Azure Sphere IoT secure chip.  

What is the likely impact on the parking industry as a result of IoT development and the continued advance of smart cities? In a word – collaboration. If other industries are a model for us to consider, then it is likely that in the future each parking company will narrow its focus to its specialty skills – whether they be hardware, software or other – and collaborate with other existing companies in the sector who can provide the complementary skills to make up the whole package. 

This may seem unlikely at present as we all rush to protect our market share in the existing environment. However, if we look at the auto industry in the US or Europe, the global aircraft industry, or almost any of the transport industries across the world, we find that major contracts are supplied by collaborative partners that each provide the element that they do better than others and together, they deliver to the customers’ expectations.

Today’s consumer has an unprecedented level of choice. Smart phones and tablets provide access to mapping and aggregation platforms that hand power to the consumer when selecting their transactional partner for every dollar they spend. User experience and customer journey are already the judgement criteria for the goods and services we, as members of the parking industry, provide.

The parking industry’s ability to seamlessly integrate with all of our customer’s touchpoints will depend on our ability to evolve, collaborate and embrace the IoT platforms that will enable us to become an integral part of the core infrastructure of the smart city and an asset to the smart populace.

For further information, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au.  

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A message from DIVVY’s CEO on COVID-19

DIVVY & Justbooked logo

I’m sure you’ve been hearing from a lot of your businesses and suppliers you work with this week regarding their plans for COVID-19 (Coronavirus) and things to be aware of. And although this can feel overwhelming, we’re also aware that the more information people have in times like this, the more people are aware and informed of how they can make conscious decisions for their own health and well-being.

At DIVVY and Justbooked, we have implemented a couple of policies that we want to make you aware of so that you have the information you need as one of our building owners, parkers or listers.

We currently have no staff who have reported a COVID-19 diagnosis, however as we feel a strong sense of responsibility for all of our staff and customers we have taken all reasonable measures to protect them in these uncertain times. We have implemented a 14-day quarantine policy from Wednesday 25 February 2020 for all staff who had traveled overseas or were living with people who had traveled overseas. Since actioning this policy, we’ve had some of our people working remotely but this has now been escalated and from Monday 16 March 2020, most of DIVVY’s staff have been asked to work remotely where possible.

Our staff are being encouraged to change external meetings to video conferences unless required to be onsite and those staff who are required to travel to site are following up with contractors and suppliers on their building policies for COVID-19 before travelling to these sites to ensure they’re working a safe environment.

What does this mean for our customers? Right now, this should not have any impact on the services DIVVY & Justbooked provide and we’re working as hard as possible to ensure we deliver our best service for you during these times. We’re taking measures to protect our staff from the spread of infection and we want you to know that our team is working with our building owners and listers everyday to keep up to date with their policies that they’re following to offer a safe and healthy workplace and car park for their building visitors.

If a building reports a case of COVID-19 we will inform all our DIVVY Users who have had bookings in the previous 30 days to ensure they’re notified immediately and can action their own plan. We’ve already had to undertake this process for two buildings that DIVVY offers parking and are monitoring for any future cases.

We thank you for your understanding during this time and if there’s any questions you have about any of this please feel free to touch base with any of our DIVVY or Justbooked team members who will be more than happy to assist.

For further information, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au.

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Australia’s Electric Vehicle Future

Australia’s Electric Vehicle

And it’s closer than you might think. Electric vehicles already comprise 56% of the market in Norway and 25% in Iceland. Britain recently announced a ban on new petrol, diesel and hybrid vehicles from 2035. Car manufacturers are embracing the change, with Mercedes-Benz ceasing development of combustion engine vehicles to focus on electric vehicles. Honda has confirmed that they will no longer produce petrol cars in Europe from 2022 and Volkswagen are planning to cease production of petrol cars entirely after 2026.

The future of cars is electric.

With the international manufacture of internal combustion engine vehicles in decline, and no car manufacturing industry of our own, Australia’s electric vehicle future is in no doubt. New figures from the Electric Vehicle Council show that sales of electric vehicles in Australia tripled in 2019, whilst sales of new petrol and diesel vehicles fell by 7.8% in the same period. Despite this increase, electric vehicle sales in Australia were still far lower than in a majority of developed countries, comprising only 0.6% of our market (compared to 15% in the Netherlands or 4.7% in China).

Unlike in the EU and China, the Australian electric car market has not received governmental incentives or support. Despite this, government analysis last year predicted that even without policy support to spur change, half of new cars sold in Australia in 2035 will be electric vehicles. Australian drivers clearly consider the reduced environmental impact of electric vehicles worth investing in.

Electric vehicles are currently more expensive than their internal combustion engine counterparts, and it is expected that there will be a rapid uptake in Australian electric vehicle ownership once their price becomes competitive. The falling price of lithium-ion battery packs is the key factor to achieving price parity with petrol vehicles, and the cost of batteries has been steadily falling since 2010 thanks to global investment in electric vehicle battery production. Bloomberg predicts that price parity will occur in 2025 and electric vehicles will become as cheap as their petrol equivalents.

Another barrier to the adoption of electric vehicles thus far in Australia is ‘range anxiety’, with a lack of public charging infrastructure limiting the uptake of electric vehicles. Groups such as Infrastructure Australia, the government’s independent infrastructure advisor, have been calling for the expedited roll-out of a national charging network to ensure a seamless transition to an electrified transport sector.

The NRMA  recognise the direction in which the industry is heading and have positioned themselves at the forefront of the electric car’s future. They have committed $10 million to build one of Australia’s largest electric vehicle fast-charging networks, comprised of more than 40 chargers across regional NSW and free to use for NRMA members. Meanwhile, the transport industry awaits the government’s National Electric Vehicle Strategy, due to be finalised in mid-2020.

At DIVVY we have an ethos of future thinking, and are developing exciting, cutting edge technology to improve peoples’ lives and drive sustainable practices. Here at DIVVY we are excited for the electric vehicle revolution and are actively investigating how best to position ourselves to facilitate this seismic shift in the transport industry and how we can support our current and soon to be electric vehicle-driving DIVVY users.

We look forward to playing our part in Australia’s electric future. For further information, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au.

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How DIVVY Enterprise can generate revenue for your business

Park your car at allotted car parking bay

DIVVY Enterprise is helping businesses across Australia manage their staff parking with maximum efficiency and minimum fuss. Discover how it can also provide your business with an effortless new revenue stream.

Is your carpark always half full? Once the DIVVY Enterprise parking system has streamlined the management of your business’s car parking, it can become apparent that your parking assets are in excess of your requirements. DIVVY Enterprise offers the opportunity to list excess car parking spaces on the DIVVY Marketplace. When parking spaces are listed on DIVVY Marketplace, they become available for booking by others outside your existing parking pool – at a price.

DIVVY Enterprise gives you the control to set the parking product and the rate charged, and the car parking space instantly becomes available to be booked on the DIVVY app. It’s an effortless new revenue source.

Importantly, DIVVY Enterprise offers the utmost in security by allowing you to control who has access to your valuable car parking inventory and when. The Premium Pass options allow you to exercise discretion around who can access the parking spaces you list on DIVVY Marketplace. Choose to open your car parking bays to be booked only by specific people or groups, or all DIVVY users.

For example, businesses may choose to make their car parking spaces available only to other tenants in their building, thus eliminating building access issues. Or they might choose to open the parking spaces to all the existing employees of your business, allowing the entire workforce beyond the current parkers to park onsite at a price.

Alternatively, you can choose to make your car parking bays bookable by all of DIVVY’s 65,000 Australian users for maximum revenue generation opportunities. You set the available times, whether it be weekdays only, or weekends, or specific dayparts or for special events. You control precisely when the parking spaces are available for booking, and by whom they can be booked.

Listing your car parking spaces on DIVVY Marketplace does not mean additional work for you and your team. Thanks to the DIVVY app and DIVVY’s state-of-the-art access controller technology, DIVVY Enterprise offers a seamless parking experience for both car park operators and drivers.

The DIVVY Enterprise real time system integrates bookings, payments and access into one seamless inventory management platform. Not only does the DIVVY Enterprise system save car parking managers and administrators time and hassle, but drivers too. Drivers book and pay for their parking via the DIVVY app and access the carpark using QR code or personalised pin code technology, enjoying an easy, frictionless car parking experience.

Should troubleshooting be required, DIVVY offers support to all parkers and businesses 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year via phone, live chat and email. DIVVY customer support staff have access to operate boom gates and roller doors, meaning real solutions for parkers and saving property and facilities teams time and effort.

For further information about how DIVVY Enterprise can help your business generate new revenue from your existing car parking assets, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au.  

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Australian parking technology is gaining interest overseas

Driving a car through Sydney harbour Bridge

The largest parking organisations operating in Australia today are foreign-owned entities. In contrast, DIVVY is 100% Australian owned.

As an Australian business, DIVVY is making a positive contribution to Australia’s urban communities by providing smarter parking solutions, and to the country’s economic development and prosperity too.

Most of DIVVY employees are based in Australia, which means Australian jobs, but it also has another very significant implication – the development of Australian-owned world first technology. DIVVY is unique in the Australian parking landscape in its focus on the in-house development and creation of new technology and is constantly developing innovative new technologies. These include the award-winning DIVVY access control devices, the DIVVY payment solution and the new parking aggregator – Justbooked.

The Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade) is lending support to DIVVY’s vision to export its market -leading technology to the world. Austrade is Australia’s lead government agency for international trade promotion and investment attraction and their Smart Cities initiative is behind DIVVY as it takes its technology to the global marketplace.

DIVVY is receiving interest in European markets, with parking technology companies looking to DIVVY to offer an alternative Smart Cities focused solution for their parking needs. DIVVY access control equipment is an inexpensive solution with little impact on capital works budgets and easy for any electrical contractor to install. DIVVY’s parking solution is attractive to the leaders in the parking and property industry, not just in Australia but globally.

DIVVY is actively engaged in partnership discussions with parking equipment suppliers and parking operators in several European cities including Prague, Vilnius, Cluj and Riga. Of special interest is the work that DIVVY is doing in the IoT space, which to date, has had little impact on the parking industry but is critical to the integration of bookable assets in the Smart Cities environment.

The contribution of Australian owned and operated DIVVY to both smarter cities and local economic growth is clear, both now and into the future. Watch this space!

For further information, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au.

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Smarter Parking Report released with The NRMA

NRMA Smarter Parking Report - Case Reform


Several buildings located across some of Sydney’s busiest suburbs are utilising less than one-third of available parking spaces, while up to thirty percent of traffic in congested areas is looking for parking spaces, according to a new report released by the NRMA and DIVVY.

The Smarter Parking Report, released to coincide with the Roads Australia Transport Summit, details the parking problems plaguing Australian cities and highlights the huge imbalance between parking supply and demand.

Currently, the average casual daily parking rate in Sydney is $70.85, compared with $18.21 in Canberra and $22.29 in Adelaide.

With even some of the largest institutional owners of car spaces forced to leave parking assets dormant – often due to restrictions and regulations – the NRMA and DIVVY looked at parking utilisation rates across seven Sydney buildings and found those that forbid public access had significantly lower utilisation rates than those that allowed parking non-tenants.

One building in Walker Street, North Sydney had just 32 per cents of spaces used, a Harris Street, Pyrmont lot had 74 per cent utilisation while a Clarence Street building had 20 per cent of spaces left vacant.

By contrast, the remaining four buildings audited across the Sydney and Parramatta CBDs that allowed public access all saw utilisation rates between 90-97 per cent.

Globally, Australia has some of the lowest ratios of car spaces to workers. The Sydney and Melbourne CBDs have just 12.2 and 14.2 spaces for ever 100 workers.

NRMA CEO Rohan Lund said; Members were frustrated with parking options and exorbitant costs in metropolitan areas right across Australia.

“NRMA research shows 44 per cent of drivers have returned home because they couldn’t find a parking spaces,” Mr Lund said.

“When two out of every five Members we survey tell us they are now often avoiding specific locations because of parking, we know access to parking is having an adverse effect on the economy, particularly small businesses who rely on accessibility.

“We now need to start thinking outside the square when it comes to solving our parking issues. We must find innovative ways to unlock more of the spaces that lie dormant every day, improve the last-mile for workers through commuter car parks and use available technologies to move toward smart cities.”

DIVVY CEO Grant Fowler said:

“Empty parking spaces represented the huge untapped potential for both businesses and frustrated drivers, helping to address Sydney’s parking shortage and opening an additional revenue stream for businesses.

“We know that up to 30 percent of the traffic in metropolitan areas is cruising for a parking space. Taking more of the parking volume off the street allows cities to move more freely,”

“Using technology such as DIVVY, businesses can become aware of the possibilities that now exist and parking assets no longer need to sit unused.”

“There are thousands of parking spaces that lie dormant every day and just as many drivers who are in search of a parking space. Businesses, along with all levels of government need to adjust their policies and planning so more of these spaces can open up for public use.”

Read the Smarter Parking Report Here or see what our partners at the NRMA have to say