Challenge

Noleggiare was founded in 2006 with a single location in Italy’s Mantua province and a fleet of fewer than 100 vehicles. Today, the company operates 60 locations across Italy, offering a fleet of 12,000 vehicles to business and leisure travelers from around the world.

The company credits its success to using technology and data analysis to effectively understand and fulfill its customers’ needs. “Our journey has been characterised by the continuous evolution of our IT systems,” said Oreste Ruffolo, business process engineer at Noleggiare.

As Noleggiare grew, the company encountered issues with its payments infrastructure. Italy’s tourism industry had changed, with visitors coming from an increasingly wide range of countries and preferred payment methods. But adding new methods took Noleggiare’s IT team days, and the company’s existing payment provider offered few capabilities to increase conversion.

At rental checkout counters, preauthorizations—temporary holds on customers’ cards to cover potential damages or additional charges—frequently failed with contactless payments. The company also wanted its in-person payment technology to help enforce its rules about what payment methods customers could use for different rental types. For example, debit cards are only accepted for certain (typically lower-cost) vehicle categories and for particular booking channels, but employees occasionally had accepted debit cards for other categories and channels by mistake.

Internal teams also struggled with insufficient data and reporting capabilities, in addition to complex integrations with other systems. There was one data model for in-store payments and another for online payments, making it difficult to automate reporting workflows. In 2024, Noleggiare decided to select a new payment provider to address these challenges.

Solution

Noleggiare chose Stripe based on its reputation for innovation and technological sophistication. “Our requirement was to find a partner focused primarily on technological innovation,” said Ruffolo. “We think a payment solution must be modern and ready to continuously evolve.”

Noleggiare implemented Stripe Payments to accept online payments in a variety of methods—including credit cards and digital wallets (Apple Pay and Google Pay)—to serve both Italian travelers and Italy’s growing international tourism market. To free up time for the IT team, Noleggiare selected the Payment Element, a UI component that lets the company turn on additional payment methods with no coding or development.

Noleggiare chose Stripe Terminal, Stripe’s in-person payment solution, to power transactions at its branches. Stores accepting payments with credit, debit, prepaid cards, and digital wallets used Stripe Reader S700 and S710—which offers cellular connectivity as a backup to Wi-Fi. Branches can now easily order devices and accessories through the Stripe Dashboard, which administrators also use to manage devices efficiently.

Terminal also lets Noleggiare enforce rules about which payment methods customers can use to rent different types of vehicles. For example, Noleggiare’s IT team is configuring Terminal to allow the use of debit cards only for rentals in eligible vehicle categories, so employees can no longer mistakenly accept debit cards for categories that must be paid with a credit card.

Data from online and in-person payments now flows into a unified data model, making it easier for internal teams to track customer buying trends and personalize the customer experience. Noleggiare’s engineers also used Stripe’s APIs to build integrations with other internal systems—including an ERP, an SQL server, and Qlik—for reporting and reconciliation.

Results

Noleggiare implements new payment methods in one to two days

Stripe’s developer-friendly APIs and documentation let Noleggiare’s IT team quickly implement new features and functionality. The initial integration—which Noleggiare’s IT team completed independently—took less than half the time required to implement the company’s previous solution.

With the Payment Element, Noleggiare can make new payment methods available to customers in 24 to 48 hours, compared with several days using its previous provider. “The Payment Element is a truly effective tool,” said Ruffolo. “The documentation is so clear that my developer colleagues can add a new payment method in a few hours.”

This efficiency promises to help Noleggiare continue improving the payments experience for both domestic and international travelers. The team is currently evaluating new payment methods, such as buy now, pay later options through Scalapay and Klarna and additional digital wallets such as Revolut Pay. Noleggiare is also preparing to allow international customers to pay in their own currency both online and in-store by 2026.

Conversion rate increases by over 15%, 2 months after launching with Stripe

Noleggiare’s conversion rate increased by over 15% in just the first 2 months since adopting Stripe. “Our priority for payments is to enable Italian and international customers to pay securely with their preferred payment method,” said Ruffolo.

Stripe’s conversion-optimized user experience helps customers complete their payments quickly and easily, reducing the number of incomplete transactions and increasing Noleggiare’s revenue from online bookings. “Everything is very intuitive and fast, as it should be,” said Ruffolo.

Customers easily make contactless payments in-store

Preauthorizations on contactless payments often failed with Noleggiare’s previous payment provider due to issues with tokenization—the key security process that enables secure contactless payments. With Terminal, stores can now reliably accept contactless payments. “It was the most important problem we needed to solve with a new modern technology, and fortunately now we have overcome it,” said Ruffolo.

Time to complete reporting and reconciliation decreased by 70%

Stripe’s APIs let Noleggiare’s IT team build a reliable integration with the company’s business intelligence platform, where finance personnel complete reporting and reconciliation. “Today, we are able to create reports and reconcile payments with a time saving of over 70% compared to before,” said Ruffolo.

With detailed data that covers both online and in-person transactions, Stripe also enables internal teams to track KPIs that were previously unavailable.

Stripe positions Noleggiare for growth and transformation

In the search for a new payment provider, the Noleggiare team placed a high priority on finding a partner that would help the company pursue its mission of providing mobility services built around customers and their needs. “It’s clear that innovation and change will inevitably involve payment management,” said Ruffolo, who anticipates that Stripe and Noleggiare will work closely to explore new business models and revenue streams.

For example, Noleggiare is preparing to test a subscription model using Stripe Billing, Stripe’s solution for billing customers with a variety of pricing models. The company is also planning to experiment with using Stripe Issuing, Stripe’s card issuance infrastructure, to provide cards that internal teams can use to pay certain suppliers and partners.