Sheeva.AI and Visa Team to Tokenize In-Car Payments

Sheeva.AI and Visa Acceptance Solutions have teamed to launch a tokenization platform for in-vehicle commerce.

The collaboration, announced Tuesday (Nov. 21) will see Sheeva.AI — an in-vehicle payments solutions provider — employ Visa’s Cybersource Token Management Service power the first multi-use tokenization platform for in-vehicle payments by using exact vehicle location to permit payments at the point of service.

“The ease and efficiency of tokenization unlocks the multi-billion-dollar opportunity that is in-vehicle payments,” Sheeva.AI founder and CEO Evgeny Klochikhin said in a news release.

“Our product suite empowers the driver to locate and activate the fuel dispenser, EV charging station, parking gate or toll from inside the car to enable the transaction to happen, and Visa Acceptance Solutions’ platform makes the payment simple and seamless.”

This partnership uses secure storage of card data and network token management with Visa Acceptance Solutions to provide for seamless, secure in-vehicle transactions without storing the card-on-file or transmitting raw data to payment processors.

“Sheeva.AI’s integration with Cybersource Token Management Service brings this state-of-the-art digital and secure one-touch payment experience to the vehicle’s infotainment screen to make the driver’s experience easier and safer, whether used in fueling, EV charging, parking, tolling or retail around the world,” the release added.

The project is happening at a time when the ability to make in-car payments is becoming a standard feature, and one that could give drivers “the incentive to conduct an ever-broader range of everyday activities from behind the wheel,” as PYMNTS wrote earlier this year.

This year has seen Mercedes-Benz announce it was using Visa technology to enable native in-car payments.

Elsewhere, Car IQ raised $15 million to support the notion of combining trusted identity and payments to link vehicles without a payment card.

“Essentially what we’ve created is a vehicle wallet, but what’s more important is what’s inside that wallet — in our case, we’ve gone further than storing money, storing value and distributing that value,” Car IQ CEO Sterling Pratz told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.

“We actually have purses inside each wallet and those purses can be responsible for different things: you can have a purse that’s just focused on loyalty rewards, one is focused on payments, one is focused on driver incentives, and you can add value to each one of those things,” Pratz added.