Nium, a global leader in cross-border money movement, and Travel Ledger, a global B2B settlement network for the travel industry, have announced a strategic agreement to bring innovative payments solutions to travel businesses worldwide.   Nium's single platform for global payments and card issuing provides banks, fintechs, payment providers, and businesses of any size the ability to disburse and collect funds instantly across borders. Leveraging Nium's global payment network, the partnership expands Travel Ledger market reach to the whole of the UK, Europe, US, and beyond.   On the other hand, Travel Ledger simplifies the time-consuming processes of B2B invoicing and settlement by facilitating Travel companies to use a single data format and platform to exchange financial information rather than everyone using different formats.   Following data exchange and reconciliation between the parties, Travel Ledger automatically creates payment instructions for funds movements amongst the parties on the Nium platform, eliminating errors, speeding up processing and ultimately reducing costs.   With this partnership, Travel Ledger can settle directly and onboard faster companies internationally.   The collaboration between the two companies results in the integration of a variety of banking services on the Travel Ledger platform, providing increased settlement automation using a variety of payment methods. This integration will allow businesses to streamline their payment processes and benefit from reduced Account Receivable and Payable Account costs.   "Foreign exchange, local settlement, and instant 'on the platform' fund's transfer are some of the key features that our partnership with Nium brings to the table; we expect this partnership to not only simplify the remittance process but also lead to cost reductions compared to traditional banking services, making it a win-win for our customers worldwide," said Roberto Da Re, Travel Ledger CEO.   "Partnering with Nium is a significant step towards achieving our mission of simplifying the remittance process for the travel industry," added the Travel Ledger CEO. "We are confident this partnership will bring tremendous value to travel businesses worldwide."   “Our partnership with Travel Ledger showcases how our solutions can provide faster, and more cost-effective money movement alternatives that helps global businesses scale and increase their topline revenues” commented Spencer Hanlon, Global Head of Travel Payments & Head of Europe at Nium.   This partnership is a testament to Nium and Travel Ledger's commitment to driving innovation and providing businesses with the tools they need to succeed in today's fast paced digital economy. The companies look forward to helping businesses simplify their payment processes and achieve global goals.

Summary

  Global air travel has been fast rebounding, and there has never been a better time for the travel industry to rebuild the synergy of the ecosystem. For airlines, because of razor-thin margins, operational optimization has become the key focus. Technological innovation in facilitating B2B travel payments has evolved rapidly, and Nium has pioneered a new approach by developing a closed-loop B2B travel payments system.  

The Challenge

  Traditional card payments, which offer travel agents and OTAs financial incentives, strike at the core of an airline’s margins. Air Europa, one of Spain’s largest airlines, was keen to adopt a modern B2B travel payments solution that reduced payment costs, settled funds faster, and improved operational efficiencies. Aspiring to increase customer loyalty while delivering seamless payment experiences, Air Europa targeted driving higher conversion rates, building innovation into processes, and regaining control over costs impacting essential cash flow.  

The Solution

  Keeping this goal in mind, Air Europa partnered with Nium to power their B2B travel payments using the closed-loop Nium Airline Payments (NAP) to improve profitability tied up in thin margins and slower settlement times. With this solution, they could improve relationships with OTAs to respond to increased customer demand—all without requiring additional technical integration.  

“We were very inspired by Nium’s innovative approach to create an alternative payment method, being proud to offer it to our B2B partners. We are communicating the availability of this new option to our travel agencies, tour operators and TMC customers, and we hope that they will soon join us in taking advantage of the benefits of using it.”  

– Yago Casasnovas Head of Payment, Fraud Prevention and Distribution, Air Europa

The Results

  Nium’s unique closed-loop B2B travel payments solution (NAP) links to Air Europa’s system directly to service higher payment volumes. It’s a bank payment for the airline, a virtual credit card payment via UATP for the OTAs, and a win-win scenario for both. An added upside is better management of disputes and refunds.   Overall, the new B2B travel payments capabilities are helping the air travel industry respond to rapid growth in bookings and resulting in higher profit margins. This, in turn, is leading to lucrative incentives for OTAs in terms of routes, seasonality, business volumes, and more.  

To learn more, download the full case study or book a call with one of our B2B travel payments experts.

Overview

  Financial technology businesses help other businesses to overcome a range of financial challenges.   When the client came to us, they were seeking assistance with their payment infrastructure. At the time, they were making payments to employees and suppliers by cash and cheque, and manually managing and tracking their expenses.   By implementing Nium, issuing business expense cards, and digitising their expense management, they were able to reduce their corporate expenses by more than 50%.   With that said, the solution we implemented for this client can work for any business, regardless of industry. We have had the pleasure of implementing this same solution in a range of scenarios, and each has resulted in a 50%+ reduction.  

The Challenge

  In this case, the business we assisted was handling their expense management the same way many businesses do. Making payouts by cash and cheque, and manually processing and accounting for transactions.   The system they were using, while typical, consumed a lot of resources, and was putting them at a higher risk of misuse, fraud, and theft.   Here’s a typical example of how their payments were handled:  

• If an employee needed to make a payment, they’d have to ask the CEO or a team manager as they’re the only ones with authority to approve payments. As you can imagine, doing this every time someone needs to make a purchase is inefficient, time-consuming and costly.
• If the request is approved, the employee has to keep a copy of the receipt so they can give it physically or virtually to the finance team or manager. They’ll then manually document the transaction.

  While this system provides an illusion of control and order, in reality, it creates bottlenecks and reduces efficiency.   Managers and CEOs are too busy to watch over every transaction. Receipts are lost. Payments are not recorded. Unauthorised payments are made. Records don’t match up.   The odds of manually keeping track of everything and not having a single issue are slim. Even if everything goes to plan, this system still makes accounting and due diligence a serious challenge.   Fortunately, this particular client was in the finance industry and was confident that a better solution existed. While they lacked the resources to create their own solution, they knew that if they searched, they would find a solution already on the market.   While technological advancements have revolutionised many aspects of business operations, expense management has not been so fortunate. Most of the solutions available still relied on cash, cheques, and business credit cards.   Reliance on these outdated payment technologies limits the degree of impact and improvements that are possible. The client knew that if they only moved from cash/cheques to traditional credit cards, they would miss out on other growth opportunities.   On the other hand, Nium’s business expense cards are a revolutionary new way of managing corporate expenses that solve many of the flaws of traditional payment methods.  

Why They Chose Nium

  The client chose Nium as we allow businesses to improve the efficiency of their financial operations.   By providing employee expense cards and advanced expense management software, businesses can optimise their payroll, T&E/per diem, and payouts & disbursements. These changes alone can save businesses time and drastically reduce operational costs.   In the case of this client, they’d be able to solve the frustrating limitations of manually managing transactions with credit, cash and cheque. Such as:  

• Poor security against fraud and misuse.
• Lack of control and customisation.
• Difficulty of tracking and expense management.
• Inefficient, time-consuming approval and authorisation.
• Excessive demand on CEOs and managers.

 

How Do Corporations Benefit From Nium?

  As we mentioned earlier, Nium’s expense management and digital card platform provide a range of benefits that apply to any corporation in any industry. Here are just a few examples that benefited the client and can benefit you too:  

• Enhanced User Experience Digital wallets and open-loop cards provide frictionless payment solutions. Business expense cards help businesses to fund and limit transactions across categories: from payroll to travel cards, all within one wallet.

• Virtual & Physical Cards Part of what makes Nium unique is that our platform allows businesses like our client to provide employees with unique logins and personal debit cards. Better yet, Nium offers both virtual and physical card options.
• Streamlined Onboarding Unlike other providers, Nium is a Visa Issuer which means we can move from onboarding to issuing cards in 4 – 6 weeks, rather than 9 to 12 months. For corporations in a hurry, this is immensely valuable.
• Advanced Spend Control Real-time updates allow businesses to track and manage expenses as they happen. By giving each employee a card, you can control how much they have access to, where they can spend (based on Merchant Categories), how much they can spend (limits), when the access expires, and whether they need approval to make a transaction or are authorised to spend. Managers can also control spend amounts by categories and currencies too.
• Automated Reconciliation By digitising their entire financial system, businesses can streamline and automate their reconciliation. Each time a transaction is made, Nium automatically logs the transaction, approval history, receipts and more so your team don’t have to.
• Increased Earnings Nium creates a new revenue stream for businesses by giving them a share of the revenue they collect during each transaction. The more your employees spend, the more you earn.

 

How It Works:

 

1. Setup: After integrating Nium, businesses can set up and define their program using limits and controls.
2. Share: Once the program is complete, management can assign cards and login details to each employee. 
3. Fund: Each employee’s card is then prefunded with a set amount of money like a regular debit card.
4. Spend: Employees can spend the funds on approved items until the funds run out.
5. Track: Each payment is automatically tracked, logged and made into expense reports viewable within Nium’s app. 

  Ahead of World Tourism Day on 27^thSeptember – whose theme this year is ‘Rethinking Tourism’ – Spencer Hanlon, Head of Travel at B2B payments specialist Nium comments on how embracing the fintech revolution could benefit the tourism industry:    “When ‘rethinking’ any topic your mind naturally drifts to the future. You might ask ‘What’s coming down the line that can help us?’. No doubt for many aspects of the tourism industry this is the case, but when it comes to financial payments the reality is that the answers can be found in the present day (or even the recent past in some cases).   “What do I mean by that? The fintech revolution is transforming every area of our lives in ways we couldn’t have imagined even only a decade ago. But when it comes to fintech too often the travel sector is lagging behind sadly and needs to rethink its approach.    “Already we have available new tools and services that not only breathe new life into processes we are familiar with, saving us precious time and often even more precious money, but also provide us with new opportunities we might not have considered before.   “For example the wider spread use of charge back protection could give greater peace of mind to both merchants and consumers, whilst helping to fight fraud. This would have the added benefit of bringing down costs for services too.    “Meanwhile a more widespread use and acceptance of credit and debit cards, along with other new digital payment methods, would mean travellers no longer need to take bundles of cash on holiday with them – making themselves targets for criminals (or just anxious they might lose it). In too many popular holiday destinations around the world, outside of Western Europe and North America, cash is still the accepted payment method for small sums of money (and even big sums sometimes!). Merchants would benefit too, cash is more costly (and risky!) than digital payments in the longer term and reduces the potential for staff stealing.    “Or just look at foreign exchange transactions. By allowing travellers to no longer be at the peril of expensive exchange rate booths at the airport terminal, we need to see more services that allow them to handle such transactions digitally and shop around for the best prices. Such services exist, some great ones event, but are not mainstream enough or appealing to older travellers.    “Behind the scenes in travel too B2B payments could also equally benefit from some ‘rethinking’ too. Technology exists that allows travel intermediaries and travel suppliers to make and receive payments much more quickly than ever before, for much less cost per transaction. Such tech also gives them greater ability for reconciliations and all their back office needs. Unfortunately a great majority, even in developed markets, still haven’t embraced such technology.”

  Reading the news headlines of ‘air chaos’ recently in Europe and North America you’d be under the impression that no-one is arriving at their destination.   But how many flights are really being cancelled as a percentage of the total? Is this leading to hotel cancelations too? And what is the wider impact for the travel industry?   Spencer Hanlon, Global Head of Travel Payments at B2B payments provider Nium comments:    “We process significant volumes of B2B payments between tour operators or travel agents to settle with airlines and hotels around the world, particularly Europe and North America – and when a refund takes place we know about it. The reality is that, despite all the negative news, refunds of both flights and hotels in June were only a tiny bit higher than May’s, at 1.87% vs 1.73%.   “And for what we’ve seen for July so far that has only increased again a tiny amount, with us estimating that July will see cancellations move up to just 2.38% (less than one in 40 bookings). If that sounds high consider that these figures are aligned with what we’d have expected for a summer pre-COVID.   “Nonetheless, with further disruptions planned for this summer in the forms of strikes and many big airlines cancelling massively – evidently travel sellers and travel providers need to be braced for increases in refunds. For a lot of travel businesses – be they an intermediary or a provider – refunds are problematic not just because of lost revenue but because of the administrative headache involved.   “The smart companies have now long-since digitized and streamlined their payments and refunds processes, allowing them to cope with such volatility. But there’s still time to change, who knows that kind of volatility could be round the corner?”   Carlos Cendra, Director of Marketing & Sales at travel intelligence provider Mabrian comments:   “This data from Nium broadly fits with what we are seeing in terms of airline scheduling. Yes, there’s a very high number of flights being cancelled across Europe in absolute numbers, but in terms of the overall percentage of flights being cancelled the figures are quite low.   “Looking at recent cancellations of scheduled flights by comparing 14^th June’s schedule to 28^th June’s for flights from 1^st to 15^th July, the highest rate we’ve seen is for easyJet, which had cancelled around 5% of flights – but for some airlines, such as Air Europa that figure has been as low as 0.5%. Consider also that many of those whose flights were cancelled are being put onto alternative flights, so most will still be arriving.   “One issue that its potentially very concerning though is that the delays – or even simply just the perception or risk of delays – could lead to travellers having entirely unfair and unjustified negative perceptions about the destinations they are travelling too. This would impact their chances of returning to that destination or recommending to a friend. We’re keeping a close eye on social media monitoring tools that we have to see how visitor perception of destinations is evolving in relation to the news about air delays.”   Alice Ferrari, Founder & CEO of Kyte, an API used by airlines to sell NDC content, comments:    “Flight disruptions this summer are happening in unprecedented volumes with a major impact on travellers. Delays, missed connections, and lost luggage are causing a lot of stress for passengers going on their long-awaited holidays. Unfortunately airlines and suppliers have had to balance cost reductions to survive the pandemic, whilst trying to predict the return of demand for travel. Clearly traffic did not return gradually which caught the industry quite unprepared for the underlying challenges leading to the need for cancelations and delays.   “Current shortfalls highlight the need for much better tools to handle basic customer service. There is so much opportunity to bring in technology that enables seamless rebookings, provides passenger updates on information digitally in real time, automates refunds where needed, offers travellers options such as alternative routes via an app, uses AI and bots to respond to simple enquiries, and much more.   “What is the only way for such systems to work? They all need to be able to connect and exchange information.   “Whilst the airline industry is often criticised for poor technology and slow innovation, people often fail to remember how deeply complex and interlinked each system is and how all systems depend on one another. Often this is the route cause for the slow implementation of modern tools.   “At Kyte we envisage a world with no more queues or agents at a counter processing each passenger manually. However, we are not far from a world where travellers can self-serve and manage their alternative options on their own devices. The evolution is happening, but slowly.”   Leyla Allahverdiyeva, CSMO from RoadRunAir, a private jet tour operator, comments:    “Travelers do seem more concerned about cancellations, loss of luggage and delays when booking their holidays right now –  that we are hearing loud and clear from our travel advisor partners. Because of this recently we have seen an even higher pick up in both enquiries and bookings, as travel advisors know we use private airport terminals and our own private jets – and their clients feel more reassured by such an experience.”   Fabian Gonzalez from Forward_MAD, a luxury tourism conference taking place in Madrid this October, comments:   “Overall the luxury sector isn’t so worried about the cancellations and delays as the package holiday, mainstream tourism part of the industry is.   “Why? Firstly because the problems are mostly focused around the low-cost carriers such as easyJet and Ryanair; and secondly because it is the fly-and-flop package destinations that are being hit hardest. So in both cases luxury travellers tend not to be the target market.   “When we look at Madrid, for example, the top outbound destinations for luxury travellers are places like the Middle East, New York or Los Angeles in the US, or Mexico and Colombia in LATAM. Those travellers arrive with legacy carriers and these routes are profitable, so the airlines aren’t cutting there yet.   “Meanwhile the traditional private jet companies are in good shape and ready to break another record year, while new business models and startups in the private aviation segment are definitely gaining traction thanks in part to this chaos.”

  Following the recently completed acquisition of B2B travel payments specialist Ixaris into Nium – the global platform for money movement –  the travel payments team at Nium is pleased to confirm that an unprecedented travel resurgence is truly under way: year-to-date, like-for-like travel bookings payments processed by Nium are up by 89% Vs the same period in 2019.   But this welcome resurgence brings risks as well as rewards, warns Spencer Hanlon in his role as Global Head of Travel Payments at Nium:   “As the recovery really takes hold we’re all still kind of on a level playing field, there really has never been a more exciting time to work in travel. But not everyone has taken advantage of the recent downtime to do away with many of the legacy systems that have held travel back for too long and prepare for the recovery – sadly B2B payments systems really are still stuck in the 1970s in many travel businesses the world over.   “As travel recovers rapidly this could mean many permanently miss their chance to get back to where they were, simply because their financial systems can’t take the strain.”   If you are looking for industry comment and views then together Spencer and his colleagues John Taylor and Tiago Coimbra  –  in their roles as Head of Airlines Payments and Head of Hotel Payments respectively at Nium – can speak about a wide range of payments related topics affecting the travel agent and tour operator space, hospitality, and aviation.   Topics they can comment on include (but are not limited to):  

• How to automate and reduce costs on cancelations volatility once and for all.
• The financial strain many travel businesses will have as the recovery means they need to expand their credit lines very quickly (whilst their creditors won’t want to).
• The impact of a high inflation environment on travel businesses.

  Feel free to quote from the above and if you wish to interview any of them or gain a briefing please contact [email protected] to arrange.