Say goodbye to parking tickets

South Africans who frequent malls and shopping centres can use Admyt to completely ditch physical parking tickets.

Launched out of Australia by former Joburger Jordan Wainer, Admyt uses numberplate recognition technology to automatically open booms at parking lots for registered vehicles, enabling faster entry and exit.

It also eliminates the hassle of carrying a ticket around and paying parking fees at a station before exiting malls or other supported locations.

The number of cars registered on the South African ticketless parking platform has surged to over 280,000 since its launch in 2016. It is processing over four million parking “events” every year.

Admyt chief technology officer Jaco van der Merwe recently told RSG Geldsake that the app’s initial growth was gradual but had recently accelerated.

Van der Merwe has been with the company full-time since 2018 and has played an instrumental role in its software development, including addressing early legacy code that caused teething issues.

As of January 2025, Admyt supports ticketless entry at nearly 70 South African malls and shopping centres, after initially only being available at four locations.

Among the most well-known locations are Mall of Africa, Sandton City, the V&A Waterfront, Nelson Mandela Square, Fourways Mall, Canal Walk, and The Zone @ Rosebank.

Property development giant Hyprop also announced in September 2024 that it would be rolling out Admyt’s systems in 175 parking lanes across several major malls, providing access to a combined 30,000 parking bays.

Outside of South Africa, Admyt also offers its systems at two locations in Poland.

However, Van der Merwe told RSG its primary focus remained in South Africa, particularly considering the local popularity of private car ownership.

While he stepped down as CEO in March 2021, Wainer continues to serve as a part-time advisor to the firm.

Devon Beynon and Kfir Rusin are currently joint Admyt CEOs.

How Admyt works

To start using Admyt, customers must sign up via its website or mobile apps.

Aside from personal information, they must provide their vehicle’s licence plate number and a payment option.

Users can either load money into a prepaid wallet for more controlled spending or pay directly with their bank card.

When their registered vehicle enters an Admyt-supported parking lot, a camera connected to licence plate recognition software will identify their car and open the boom automatically.

Once the vehicle leaves the premises, a camera scans its number plate again and opens the exit boom.

The system records the time at which the user’s vehicle enters and exits the parking to calculate the fare they pay, which will correlate with the mall’s parking rates.

For the convenience that Admyt offers, it charges an additional fee of R1 on top of the regular parking charge. If a parking session is free, no charge is levied.

Assuming that around a quarter of Admyt’s parking events were for free parking sessions, the company is collecting annual revenues in the region of R3 million.

To address one of their users’ biggest complaints that the system sometimes fails to detect their vehicles, the company has also developed a QR code scanning system for select locations as a fallback option.

Where supported, customers can use a QR code on the Amyt mobile app as an alternative in cases where the licence plate recognition system fails to read their registration.

The locations that support this feature have a blue “a” logo on Admyt’s list of supported locations.