23rd May, 2022
There are many complexities that are associated with the air cargo business, and the industry hopes to benefit from the offerings that intend to streamline freight management and improve the overall operational efficiency for the players involved.
One critical area is related to receiving timely payment for a service. On the positive side, the industry has seen effort being made to facilitate faster payments for shipments or letting cargo providers to cut down on payment costs.
The issues were discussed today at the Ai’s online Cargo Payments Summit.
Optimizing freight payments
- Pierre Lebrun, Senior Business Developer, Thunes Collections, a cross-border payments company, referred to the significance of the payment infrastructure. He highlighted that payment is a “pain for cargo companies using traditional means of payment”. “Digital payment methods result in cost efficiency and can be adapted to cargo selling process, risk mitigation and reconciliation ease,” he said. Lebrun underlined the importance of payment digitalization internationally for cargo companies, who need to paid, and also for IT providers for cargo business who need to integrate payment methods.
- Anuj Tewari, Director Enterprise Partnerships, Mastercard spoke about payment trends and how the industry is inching towards a real-time world of air cargo and logistics.
Mastercard asserts that companies across the freight and logistics sector need to focus on several areas – from digitizing and automating manual operational processes to enhancing visibility and eradicating invoice disputes, to triggering event-based payments and on-demand capital to boost cashflow.
- Louis Tan, Rapyd underlined the potential of fintech as a service platform. He mentioned that a merchant can set up business wallets to facilitate the collection of funds via various payment methods. Other possibilities that can be explored are virtual bank account numbers (which are associated with the designated wallets) in certain countries. Funds can be transferred between wallets, he said. This way companies avail local payment methods in local currency, improve liquidity, rationalize costs and also combat fraud.
The event also featured Dr Ricardo Pilon, Henk Mulder, Head – Digital Cargo, Olivier Houri, SmartKargo, IATA, Paul van Alfen, and Christian Gessner, Business Leader Airline Platforms, Wipro, Len Lubbe and Tyron Landsberg from LoyaltyPlus.
By Ritesh Gupta, Ai Events
