Parked Funds.

Vehicle rental operators lose real money to disputes, chargebacks, unpaid post-hire charges and identity fraud. I know because it happened to me. I would lose a dispute I should have won, purely because I had no clean audit trail to point to, just a folder of screenshots and a manual Stripe export.

Every tool I looked at handled one slice of the problem. One did bonds. One did identity. One did disputes. The rest stayed manual. There was clearly room for a single Stripe-native product that covered the whole flow, from the moment the customer picks the car up to the moment a bank claws money back.

Parked Funds is that product. It takes bond holds and auto-refreshes them in Stripe so they never lapse, which mattered because Stripe's authorisation holds expire after seven days and most hires run longer. It verifies the driver's identity before pickup through Stripe Identity. It turns post-hire damage into a structured claim with documentation and a payment link. And when a dispute lands, it assembles a Stripe-ready evidence pack in minutes instead of an afternoon of digging.

The architecture was the hard part. It is multi-tenant, and each operator connects their own Stripe account through Connect, which is why an operator in Japan can bring their own regional Stripe account and it just works. Windcave handles the cheaper NZ card leg through smart routing. The whole thing leans on Stripe's manual-capture and re-authorisation tooling, so it had to be built Stripe-first from the ground up rather than bolted together. The result is an operator who looks organised and in control, and who wins the disputes they used to quietly eat.