A five-year terminal contract that will enable Avis Europe PLC Inc. to process and manage transactions from numerous European countries will help position French terminal maker Ingenico SA to corner the European car-rental market, company executives and an industry analyst say.
Starting in early 2012, Ingenico will supply Avis Europe, which operates Avis and Budget rental car services, with 3,000 iCT250 chip-and-PIN terminals and its Axis payment software to more than 1,000 car-rental locations throughout Europe, the companies announced Sept. 14. Terms were not disclosed.
Axis represents the first software system that can operate in multiple countries and that complies with various international payment regulations and standards, including the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, Craig Doyle, managing director of Ingenico Northern Europe, tells PaymentsSource.
“By utilizing this centralized payment system, we are able to have a global view of the transactions and route them, no matter where they originate from geographically,” Doyle says.
Before the Ingenico agreement, the various Avis company locations throughout Europe were operating “with localized or standalone payment systems” that could not be integrated, Doyle says.
Ingenico has developed a payment-acceptance option that will serve the car-rental market well, one analyst contends.
“The car-rental business (payments process) has always been handled by niche providers, and now Ingenico is offering one that can be operated between countries, allowing them to really leverage that to address this niche,” Gil Luria, analyst with Los Angeles-based Wedbush Securities, tells PaymentsSource.
The car-rental market represents an “incremental opportunity” for Ingenico because it will have the opportunity to sell “tens of thousands of terminals” in the coming years, Luria says.
Because Ingenico has manufactured terminals for various European countries, the company was able “to figure out the problem” of developing a payment system that could accommodate the nuances of each, Luria says.
“They have done the hard part in solving the problem,” he adds. “Now the easier part of the equation would be to sell to all of the [car-rental] agencies that would benefit with such a program.”
The move into the car-rental market expands the use of the Axis payment system, which Ingenico terminals have used in the routing of 1.6 billion transactions to processors in Europe annually for retail, hospitality, transportation and fuel industries, Ingenico noted in a press release.
Those transaction totals could increase dramatically as use of Ingenico terminals grows in the car-rental market, Doyle contends.
It was difficult for Ingenico to offer a terminal capable of accepting and routing transactions in multiple countries for the car-rental market as few as four years ago because the various software elements required were not available and delivering and servicing an Internet-based program was not possible in countries that lacked needed technologies, Doyle says.
Eighty-six percent of Avis Europe’s revenue is generated in its core market of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, the company website reports. Ingenico did not specify how many of the 3,000 iCT250 terminals would be earmarked for each country in which Avis operates.
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