Money direct to our accounts

When James Filsinger, [pictured right] US based CEO of Moneydirect, a company that started right here in Australia, met with The Mole recently, he said that Moira Scerri, Moneydirect’s BD for Asia Pacific, who reports to James, was the heart and soul of Moneydirect.

He added that when they started looking globally for a solution in this space they did not find one until they looked in Australia finding Mondeydirect, which offered effectively what was globally unique technology.

He said, “We ran due diligence and found Moneydirect to be great technology,”  adding,  “We were rather surprised to find Moneydirect in Australia especially as Moneydirect has had such success in this market in the non air space.”

He told the Mole, “Moneydirect is now the leading provider of multi-channel payment solutions for the global travel industry, offering a flexible solution enabling the industry to streamline your payment and collection processes, delivering significant advantages in terms of efficiency, customer service, increased productivity and improved cash flows to travel businesses.”

He said, “The great thing about Moneydirect is that it is easy to use, secure and reliable and can be deployed irrespective of booking channel, direction of funds, type or timing of payment or currency, with several thousand customers currently trusting Moneydirect to securely manage more than US$2 billion annually in global travel payments on what we believe is without doubt, the best in its class processing platform.”

James told The Mole that Moneydirect is the genesis of a joint venture between Sabre and Amadeus announced on September 12 and that he was also announced CEO and GM, adding. “The structure is that the JV is being established in Ireland and there is a US and Aus subsidiary, with the Aus business being the existing Aus business.”   

“It is a 50/50 partnership and that is how the board is structured, with Amadeus putting in the Aus business and Sabre putting in funds, providing the opportunity for Moneydirect to launch globally.”  

“The great thing is that this technology originated in Australia and as there is nobody else doing this in the world around the no air processing, we saw Moneydirect as an opportunity to establish and industry global standard.”

“It is GDS independent so you do not need to be Sabre or Amadeus and in fact, it is also channel independent and flexible enough for any form of payment, a fact that we took into account in Moneydirect being able to provide a global solution.”

“One of the key issues was that the non-air side of travel is so diverse and fragmented and for us or anyone to have to tried to pull that together from scratch would have taken significant investment, but by Sabre and Amadeus coming together is an excellent solution.”

“Moneydirect has been commercially available since 1998, it went through a technology refresh in 2003/4 and we have also enhancements in place for the new year.”

“One of the uses for example is that hotels can use MD to process commissions and some hotels manage their commission centrally and others at property level, but Moneydirect gives the opportunity to facilitate the flow of funds from properties to travel agencies and the hotels.”

“This also applies to prepayment and saves the hassle and cost of cutting cheque and Moneydirect’s flexibility means it can be used the smallest operator to the biggest – it is really scaleable.”

Regarding the future, he said, “Our growth is not directly tied to on line at all as we are GDS and channel independent and we will enjoy massive growth by taking Moneydirect right throughout the world.”  “We will fuel our growth by getting more users and while some may wonder why have not left the technology in Australia, the reason we chose Ireland is that it is right on Greenwich mean time, which makes the global operation much more seamless and relevant in terms of time and where our largest growth will come from in Europe and the USA.”

“Australian technology going offshore is a big success story for Australia and with many of our customers are in Australia, we see the region as very important and we want to make sure our customers here are happy and keep using the product.”

“We want them to expand Moneydirect to their product and clients and Australia remains critical to our being a GDS and channel independent industry standard where no other exists today.”

For more information, please visit www.moneydirect.com  

A Special Report by The Mole