TIBA Brand Guidelines: The Israeli Parking Systems Maker Owned by FAAC Since 2020

A company that dates itself to 1986.

TIBA Parking Systems is an Israeli maker of parking and revenue-control systems: the barrier gates, ticket machines, pay stations and software that run paid off-street car parks. Its website carries the dates 1986–2026 in its copyright line, and its Israeli research company trades as TIBA Parking Systems R&D (1986) Ltd, according to an October 2023 announcement published by the International Parking & Mobility Institute (IPMI). The company says it has been in business for more than 40 years.

Parking came later. In a 2019 interview with the trade site Parking Network, Moshe David, chief executive since the start of 2016, said TIBA was founded in Israel about 31 or 32 years earlier and entered parking technology in the mid-1990s, quickly becoming the leader in its home market; he put its Israeli share at roughly two-thirds to 70 per cent. Israel, he said, is a small market but a competitive one, where most of the large international suppliers also compete.

The same interview dates the move abroad. About eleven or twelve years before 2019, David said, TIBA decided to enter the United States, and after a few years began to win significant business there. North America became its main market, served through a network of almost 40 resellers and integrated dealers covering most of the continent — a network he described as the largest of its kind there. He added that the four or five years before the interview had brought a marked acceleration, with changes to the product range and to the size and mix of its customers.

Resellers, the X60 and SPARK.

TIBA sells mainly through partners. FAAC’s December 2020 announcement of its purchase described a group that designs, manufactures, distributes and supports turnkey systems for paid off-street parking, with an indirect sales model built on value-added resellers. FAAC said TIBA had reached a share of more than 20 per cent of the North American market within a few years; that is FAAC’s figure.

The current hardware line is the X60. In its October 2023 announcement TIBA described X60 equipment as an embedded, controller-based platform whose components include a touch screen, an intercom, a pinhole camera, voice prompts, a printer, barcode scanners and note validators, and said it had been deploying the line in the United States, Australia and Israel since 2020. The same release launched an X60 Ticketless Solution based on licence-plate recognition, with scan-to-pay and lobby pay stations where drivers enter their plate number; TIBA said existing X60 sites could switch it on through their reseller while keeping the ticketed journey as a fallback, and that the ticketless mode had already been installed in garages in Israel.

Software sits over the hardware. TIBA calls SPARK its cloud-based parking management platform, “built on 40+ years of parking expertise,” and pairs it with digital tools such as scan-to-pay and self-service; the 2023 release also names its Smart Park software. The website addresses four markets by name — airports, hospitals, hotels and municipalities — and describes set-ups running from traditional gated car parks to ticketless sites it calls “AI-powered.” Its stated vision is a parking industry where no operator has to replace a working system, and its home page promises: “With TIBA You Will Never Need Another Parking System.” In 2019 David described an earlier slogan, the “Engaged Parking Experience,” which he said grew out of an internal review of what kind of company TIBA wanted to be, covering its relations with customers, resellers and staff.

Barriers, columns and cameras.

Most people meet parking and gate automation only at its edges: the striped barrier arm that lifts at a car park entry, the ticket column beside it, the pay station near the lift lobby and, more and more often, a camera that reads the number plate so that no ticket is issued at all. The companies in this series make those machines and the software that runs them, and their brands have to work on a steel cabinet standing in the rain as well as on a phone screen.

The series covers two neighbouring kinds of maker. Car park specialists sell access and revenue control systems to airports, shopping centres, hospitals, stadiums and city operators. Gate and door automation makers sell motors, control boards and remote openers for sliding and swing gates, garage doors and road barriers, equipment that installers fit, set up and service on site.

The settings these makers show are practical ones: a barrier at a busy entry lane, a pay station in a lit garage, a sliding gate in front of a villa, a training room where installers learn a control board.

Trade fairs give the industry its calendar. Intertraffic, held at the RAI in Amsterdam, is a large trade show for mobility and traffic technology, and runs its own awards for product innovation; R+T, a trade fair run by Messe Stuttgart, is another date in the calendar. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and what it says about its products — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Part of FAAC since 2020.

Ownership changed in 2020. On 22 December 2020 FAAC, the Italian maker of automation and vehicle and pedestrian access-control systems, announced a binding agreement to buy all the shares of the TIBA group from the Israeli private equity fund TENE Capital, the Afcon group and a number of minority shareholders, according to the announcement as published by IPMI. FAAC said TIBA’s reseller model complemented its own largely direct sales in North America, run through its business unit HUB Parking Technology, and its then chief executive, Andrea Marcellan, called parking a strategic segment for the group.

By 2023 TIBA described itself as a subsidiary of FAAC Technologies, and a FAAC Technologies executive was quoted in its X60 announcement. The company today names Ilan Lev as chief executive. It lists two head offices: a global headquarters in Petah Tikva, Israel, and a North American headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, with field technicians and regional sales staff across the United States. FAAC’s 2020 announcement placed TIBA’s headquarters and its research and development centre in Tel Aviv.

The company writes its name in capitals, TIBA, throughout its website and releases, and names its products with short codes and acronyms such as X60 and SPARK.

For a design guide, TIBA shows how a parking-equipment maker can present itself through a platform name and a promise of continuity as much as through its hardware. Compare FAAC, its owner since 2020, and SKIDATA, another maker of car park systems. For this guide we use a deep navy, a slate blue and a signal amber with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep TIBA’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.