Ai Editorial: Tokenization, data security, managing chargebacks, refunds and fraud are some of the topics that are vital for airlines to come to grips with as they gear up to be the Merchant of Record for transactions via the indirect channels in the NDC environment, writes Ai’s Ritesh Gupta.
15th September, 2021
New Distribution Capability (NDC) is an important part of the vision of travel retailing, and with airline being in control of the offer, how the same is going to impact the overall payment process and associated stakeholders in the travel distribution chain is being looked into. For instance, evaluating authorised payment methods in BSP for NDC transactions or fraud liability shift.
During Ai’s webinar this week, “NDC – Retrofitting Payments”, Thibaut Ruy, Head of Settlement with Orders Program, IATA explained payments in airline distribution, and how airlines would continue to benefit from the BSP and its enhanced value proposition (e.g. NDC card transaction in the BSP, transaction details and how can airline conduct the transaction in conjunction with its provider of payment services). A BSP is the central point through which data and funds flow between travel agents and airlines.
Ruy also spoke about NDC card payments fraud liability shift i.e. when is the NDC seller fully liable and when there is no liability on the NDC seller.
“Payment (process) has to be efficient in order to capitalize on NDC,” said Ruy.
Focusing on payment-related issues
Tokenization, data security, managing chargebacks, refunds and fraud are some of the topics that are vital for airlines to come to grips with as they gear up to be the Merchant of Record for transactions via the indirect channels in the NDC environment.
Talking about these at Ai’s webinar yesterday, “NDC – Retrofitting Payments”, Datatrans ‘ Valentin Gina said in case of tokenization, the message structure of the request and the payload remain the same. “However, two tokens replace the sensitive card information (PAN and CVV),” he said, adding that tokenization and refunds are going to work the same as they do now, with no handling of sensitive card details. As for how carriers would handle chargebacks, refunds in case encrypted card numbers are being shared, Valentin said with the unified token approach, entities can forward tokens to any PCI-compliant endpoint such as fraud prevention. Additionally, there are various APIs such as credit card checks and blacklist solutions as fraud enhancement tools.
NDC and challenges
During the same webinar, Thomas Helldorff, VP Airlines & Travel, Worldpay, said lot of infrastructure needs to be upgraded. And referring to the “mindset” change, he said another aspect that needs to be looked at is authentication.
NDC is not just about technical and commercial aspects. As Amadeus’ Adnan Beig also mentioned, it also requires cultural shift. According to Amadeus, it is imperative for each stakeholder in the value chain to understand the what, where, why and how of NDC.
Microsoft’s Sondra Feinberg referred to being adept at fraud prevention/ anomaly detection.
The webinar also featured Ann Cederhall and Tuuli Perkio, Mastercard.
