With Consumer Adoption of EMV Rampant, Pockets of Merchants Work to Catch up

Merchants, especially those reliant on point-of-sale software, continue to find themselves catching up to consumers when it comes to EMV adoption. But Rent Centric Inc., developer of browser-based software for the auto-rental industry, is the latest to make EMV acceptance available to its clients.

Toronto-based Rent Centric says it now offers EMV quick-chip payments via the payment gateway from Lakewood, N.J.-based Cardknox Development Inc. Rent Centric says clients now can accept payments from a variety of compatible on-site and mobile devices. In addition to EMV, the Cardknox gateway incorporates tokenization.

“The auto-rental industry is particularly prone to chargebacks,” Alex Aryafar, Rent Centric founder and chief technology officer, said in a press release. “By partnering with Cardknox, we can offer our users EMV processing and advanced fraud protection that will curb the threat of chargebacks.”

In its latest data, Visa Inc. says 97% of its total U.S. payments volume came from EMV chip cards. A total of 2.9 million U.S. merchants, or 63% of the total, accepted EMV as of March.