Challenge

Hertz began more than 100 years ago in Chicago with a fleet of 12 Model T Ford cars. By the end of its first decade, the rental car business had expanded into a nationwide network. Today, Hertz serves millions of customers with a fleet of over half a million cars across more than 11,000 locations in 160 countries.

Over the past century, Hertz has focused on making it easy and convenient to rent a car, constantly advancing the industry with new ideas and smart innovations. But by 2021, Hertz realized it had to significantly adapt its payment tech stack to enable the easy, hassle-free payment experience its customers had come to expect.

Because Hertz has a global presence and multiple brands (including Dollar, Thrifty, and Firefly, in addition to its flagship Hertz brand), it needed a unified commerce solution that would allow it to clearly recognize individual customers in both online and in-person touchpoints across locations and brands. Hertz wanted to ensure customers could check out easily and quickly, on all surfaces.

To create a consistently exceptional customer experience, Hertz needed a payment solution that could offer mobile optimizations and a variety of popular payment methods, such as Apple Pay, to help drive conversion and grow its online, prepaid volume. Additionally, the platform sought a solution that could easily adapt to future change, helping Hertz support new business models.

Hertz also needed advanced payments capabilities such as extended credit card authorization to keep authorization open for a longer period after the vehicle is returned.

Finally, Hertz wanted to simplify its settlement, reconciliation, and reporting processes, and use tokenization. An end-to-end payment solution would help Hertz gain efficiency and keep up with an increasing workload as the business continued to grow.

Solution

Hertz began integrating Stripe in 2022, choosing to implement Stripe Payments to process online payments and Stripe Connect to route payments and payouts across its corporate locations. This setup enabled Hertz to streamline money movement across corporate locations and reduce operational overhead.

With additional features aimed at increasing authorization—such as Adaptive Acceptance to selectively retry false declines in real time; network tokens; and Stripe’s card account updater, which automatically retrieves the latest information for expired cards—Stripe offered the capabilities Hertz needed to modernize its payment stack and create a seamless, modern checkout experience for customers around the world. Using Stripe APIs, Hertz integrated Apple Pay for its US business, enabling customers to easily pay for their car rental with the popular digital wallet when booking online or through the Hertz mobile app.

Hertz tested the new payment system methodically, starting with payment volume via Apple Pay and ramping up its credit card volume gradually to eventually consolidate the entirety of its online payment volume onto Stripe.

Hertz continued to scale payment volume in 2024 and integrated Stripe Terminal to enable in-person payments on physical card readers for a unified commerce experience. Using Stripe across channels enabled Hertz and its related brands to recognize customers in both online and in-person transactions at any corporate location. With Terminal, Hertz could use a single BBPOS WisePOS E reader at multibrand locations, such as a car rental counter in an airport, instead of using a separate reader for each brand. BBPOS WisePOS E reader also supports on-reader experiences such as signature capture, so customers can sign directly on the reader itself—eliminating the need for additional hardware or printed forms. The readers are precertified by Stripe, reducing Hertz’s workload, cost, and PCI risk exposure across varied hardware solutions.

The Stripe team addressed Hertz’s industry-specific need for extended authorization windows with updated APIs to accommodate authorization periods consistent with the car rental industry, compared to the nonrental industry window of 5 to 30 days.

With Hertz’s global payment volume consolidated onto Stripe, and Stripe products providing an end-to-end payment solution, the company has simplified reconciliation and reporting across the business. For deeper data insights, Hertz also added Stripe Sigma, which provides detailed analytics that help Hertz make informed business decisions based on real-time data.

Hertz partnered with Stripe professional services to guide its implementation of Payments and Connect. After seeing the impact and value of the team’s expertise, Hertz quickly expanded the team’s role to include the launch of Terminal. The professional services team provided guidance and helped align Hertz’s cross-functional teams on requirements, product functionality, and decisions to deliver outcomes that met the company’s business goals and timelines. The team also coordinated directly with Apple to ensure a successful Apple Pay launch.

The professional services team also provided specialized expertise to give Hertz more confidence in navigating the complex European regulatory landscape in 11 countries. The team assisted Hertz through the local nuances of payment methods and local regulations in each market, with individual rollout plans for each country that fit within a larger-scale optimized rollout plan across Hertz’s European business lines.

Results

Payment optimizations led to an uplift in authorization rates and revenue

By replacing its legacy payment tech stack with Stripe, Hertz gained the modern, reliable, and adaptable system it needed to support millions of transactions every year across the globe. Optimizations such as Stripe’s card account updater, Adaptive Acceptance, and network tokens have contributed to an increase in authorization rates and revenue.

The ability to easily add new payment methods, such as Apple Pay, now allows Hertz to offer quick and easy checkout options, helping customers complete transactions and get on the road with ease. Adding digital wallets such as Apple Pay can also help improve authorization rates compared to online card forms, and Stripe data shows that making Apple Pay available to customers can result in an increase in conversion.