6th December, 2021
How should travel merchants plan their payment initiatives going forward?
Ai Events recently concluded its #ATPS Conference, with the APAC edition.
Few highlights:
- Talking about the payment-related opportunities, David Ojerholm, The Initiatives Group said that top 5 trends haven’t changed since 2018 but expect progress and depth as we get into 2022. These opportunities are – open banking, real-time payments, alternate lending, technology in retail and digital identity.
- Ricardo Pilon spoke about implementing artificial intelligence in an organization – in and across departments. “AI can assist in one function or evolve into an enterprise level AI platform optimizing process outcomes and automating non-value added and repetitive tasks,” said Pilon. Citing an example, he said an airline can benefit from a recommender system of ancillary products with separate promotions depending upon loyalty program tier status and spend with the airline. In case of fraud prevention, the industry has focused on improvising traditional/ rules driven as well as seen adoption of unsupervised and supervised machine learning to combat fraud.
- A travel shopper wishes to pay via a cryptocurrency, how to cater to such shopper? Bitpay’s Merrick Theobald, asserted that when merchants opt for crypto acceptance, they don’t “touch the crypto”. Other highlights include no price risk, no chargebacks, next day ACH and the company charges 1% fee.
- “BNPL – nothing new as a finance (or lending) product when you think of fundamentals…(what has clicked) is new packaging of financing for consumption,” said Hubert Rachwalski, CEO, Nethone. Mike Parkinson, Director of Travel, Trustly said it’s just that the GenZ demographic thinks differently about their spending and what they expect. As studies have also indicated, for them it’s about being in control, being able to buy “more”, buying sound “cheaper” etc.
- Kelvin Lee, Discover said there has been a “mindset” shift when it comes to online spending and the popularity of digital wallets as a trend has accelerated during the pandemic. AirAsia’s #superapp path was also discussed.
- Brett Chapman, GPayments spoke about 3D Secure and how the liability shifts from the merchant to the card issuer.
- Paytech needs to support agility and choice.
By Ritesh Gupta
Ai Team
