Marqeta, Aaron’s Get Together on New Virtual Cards for Leasing

December 7, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

Most of us likely have an Aaron’s location near us, or failing that, something similar like a Rent-a-Center or a Premier Rental. Now, a new combination between Aaron’s division Progressive Leasing and Marqeta will make it easier and safer for rental customers to make payments. It’s a familiar development, too, one we recently heard about right here: a virtual card system.

The partnership effort calls for Marqeta to provide a range of technologies to Progressive Leasing to help advance its leasing operations, making it easier and simpler to make payments. That’s not just limited to virtual card issuance, however, but also includes tokenization functions—a further feature that provides security in card operations—as well as the “Just-in-Time Funding” system, a patent-pending process created by Marqeta that allows for real-time transaction functions, including authorization and reconciliation.

It’s not going to stop there, either; reports suggest that the new arrangement will lead to Marqeta and Progressive Lending working together to create further payment functions down the line. This is especially noteworthy as Aaron’s is one of the biggest firms in the lease-to-own market, which should make for plenty of customer data to draw upon to fuel further advances.

The lease-to-own industry needs all the help it can get. Since it focuses on selling products payable in smaller installments over time—with often significant markup—it needs those payments to be as convenient as possible. It also needs those payments to be safe; since the payments are recurring, that’s 12 transactions instead of one, which increases the likelihood that hackers will find at least one of those payments and pull details accordingly. A system like this should help protect users against potential hacking, which would be about the last thing Aaron’s would need.

It’s safe to say this partnership will do well for all concerned. Marqeta gets access to a huge slug of customer data to develop new tools and likely some other considerations while Aaron’s gets an easier, safer way to do business and keep users interested. Hard to see a problem here for either, and both should come out well in hand.