A Canadian Car-Services Operator Chooses Contactless-Only Payments

Unattended tire-inflation and vacuum services for cars long have accepted credit and debit cards as well as cash. Now, one provider, Irving, Texas-based AIR-serv, is taking that a step further by making contactless payments the sole option at more than 6,500 locations throughout Canada.

Payments provider MONEXGroup says it is providing the contactless-payment technology for AIR-serv. Toronto-based MONEXGroup says the readers are installed in 550 locations already with national deployment ongoing through 2018.

“This is a feature we knew we had to have as fewer Canadians are carrying coin,” Frank Merrill, executive vice president at AIR-serv Canada, said in a press release.

MONEXGroup says the contactless-only point-of-sale terminals eliminate the need to search for coins and reduces the potential for damage because there are no readers for chip cards and magnetic-stripe cards.

Contactless payments have become a favored transaction method in Canada. Payments Canada, which owns and operates Canada’s payment clearing and settlement infrastructure, said that contactless payments volume increased from 675 million transactions in 2014 to 1.15 billion in 2015. Contactless payments accounted for approximately 12% of all consumer credit and debit transactions worth as estimated C$33 billion (US$24.4 billion) in 2015.

MONEXGroup says the AIR-serv readers support Mastercard Inc.’s and Visa Inc.’s contactless protocols, in addition to Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay, and Interac Flash, a contactless debit service unique to Canada.