CAPA Elevate: Aviation Innovation Roadshow- CellPoint Digital
CAPA Elevate is designed to showcase the most influential innovations transforming aviation in the next decade. In this unmissable session key stakeholders from select CAPA partner organisations will deliver overviews of their products or services and explore its real-world applications.
Showcasing innovation has always been at the forefront of CAPA’s event strategy, and it has never been more important than it is in 2022. Expect to hear from a wide variety of interesting speakers who are revolutionaries in their own right.
Each supplier will be given a 10-minute time slot to showcase their innovation and explore how it is set to change the industry.
Speaker: Cellpoint Digital, CEO, Kristian Gjerding
CAPA Events are hosted in key markets around the world and attract the highest calibre of thought leaders and decision makers in the aviation and travel industry. Delegates are provided with unprecedented access to the latest data, insights and trends from our global team, in addition to valuable networking opportunities with executives across all sectors of the aviation and travel industry. Review CAPA’s full events calendar here.
Transcript
Kristian Gjerding:Is the microphone on? Can you guys hear? Oh, now you can. I got good news, so stick around for 10 minutes and I promise you I got 2 pieces of really, really good news for all of those of you who are in the airline industry The first one is that the business traveler is still here. I'm one of them, and in the last 3 months, I have done more business travel than I've done in the last 2 and a half years. At least 12 Atlantic crossings, and I don't know how many domestic flights. And that's really good news. And the interesting thing is that on every single flight I did, business class was totally sold out. Wow. There was not a single seat available on any of the flights, whether domestic or international. So somewhere, either there's a shortage of flights or something in the data is maybe not skewed, but just interesting. And I think this kind of leads into the second part of the good news. And do I have a little clicker here somewhere? Is that the one? Yeah. How to add 12% of your top-line revenue to your bottom line quickly and easily? And quickly and easily are typically oxymorons when you talk aviation. So it's true, and these are numbers we're seeing from our current clients in the airline industry. So if you think about that for just a second, 12% means of a billion-dollar flow or billion-dollar turnover, $120 million in return to your bottom line. Wow. Year over year. I'll talk about that in just a second, but I do think there is actually another threat to business travel other than COVID. And this is an important threat, and I heard a lot of interesting conversations earlier today, and I know there is another megatrend conversation this afternoon about the demise of business travel. What I think is a very big threat to business travel is really not what happens in the air. And I totally agree that we've got to offset carbon, we're going to minimize emissions, and I think there's a lot of things going on also outside the airline industry, which I think is pretty important. But when you look at business travel, business travel exists because it helps business travelers minimize wasted time. It's about being effective, arrive refreshed, being ready to do business, when you get there. And what is happening and what has been happening since 2001, which was at 9/11, is that business travel has increasingly, increasingly met massive amounts of friction, frustration, delays as it pertains to getting onto the plane or off the plane. It's not when we're in the air. In the air, the product's great. It's all the things before. Yeah. And I think this is really an important point. I've been a business traveler for 35 years and it's gotten a lot worse. And so if you want me off Zoom and in your seat, you need to fix the book-to-board problem, which is really getting me through the airport a lot faster than 3 to 4 hours. I'm not going to fly to London to do a 1-hour meeting, which is a 1-hour-20 flight from Arnhem Lissabon. If I have to do 3 hours of getting on the plane, that's just not feasible for me. Then I just do Zoom. Of course, if I got to do a long-haul meeting, I'll happily do it. But if you can get me through everything within an hour or 45 minutes, which is what it should be technologically possible, I'll definitely go. Perfect. And so let me get on to this. A few data points. 68% of consumers believes that in the post-COVID reality, They expect a lot more from their merchants from a digital perspective. That means more digital interactions when things go well. 4.4 billion will start using a digital wallet by 2023 to pay for online services of any kind. 90% of Western travelers will use digital payments to buy travel. And 60% of airline CEOs believe at this point in time that digital transformation is the most important thing after COVID. Transforming digitally means being able to do more with less, regaining profitability and growth. And finally, in terms of complexity, from 2019 to 2020, there was a 72% growth in cash payouts, obviously due to COVID-cancelled flights. People need to get their money back. Massive pressure on the back office. And today in 2022, there is more than 200+ payment methods globally. And if you then add banks issuing, acquirers, processors, you're looking at an ecosystem of well over 1,200 participants. That's a lot to manage. And so from that, let's talk about how we fix the top line 12% to your bottom line year over year. We use 7 tracks. It's very simple. We do payment flow reconciliation, which means we help you simplify the back-office process from a multi-acquirer reality. Ecosystem redundancy— there's a tremendous amount of money lost on transactions that either disappears, doesn't get approved, or any other way just does not work. End-to-end optimization We do direct connections on a global basis, cutting out the middleman, reducing your cost of operation in terms of payments. And we offer your consumers, your travelers, the payments of choice. 410 payment methods on a global basis. Connections is available instantly through our platform. And then we reduce your transactional costs. You're talking about reducing your costs constantly. We help you do that as well as part of this. And we give you real-time transparency on your transactions and also retrospectively, so you have analysis helping you make better decisions both in real time and on a long-term planning basis. High ROI. And finally, we do a lot of process automation, which will enable you on a back-office perspective to do a lot more with a lot less. And Just about Cellpoint Digital. We've been around 15 years. We turn payments from a cost to a profit. The numbers we gave you, the 12% equating to $120 million on a $1 billion flow, is real with real clients in operation today. Our orchestration platform is deployed fully with a number of airlines around the world, all major brands, and we're a global fintech company. We're covering everywhere from APAC, Africa, Middle East, Europe, North America, and Latin America. And then finally, we're growing 100% year over year. And this is an interesting thing when you're thinking about business travel, because we did grow from 2020 to 2021 100%, and we're growing 100% again this year and again next year. And I want to conclude by saying that I was in Las Vegas last week at ShopTalk, which is the e-commerce equivalent of what we're doing here. There was 10,000 attendees, 10,000, everybody flying in pretty much, because not 10,000 people in e-commerce lives in Las Vegas, I guarantee you. And the interesting thing is that the e-commerce economy grew 5 years in 12 months from 2020 to 2021. And if you think about that, these are businesses that were small, that are now growing, and they're becoming international, and they are not going to do business from Zoom or from home. They need to go out and meet their clients. Yesterday, I progressed a contract by meeting somebody in person that I haven't been able to meet for quite a long while. I progressed something that got stuck in legal into a completed contract to be signed week after next. And that is the power of being out there, meeting people, And where we can help is to ease at least from the checkout to the ticketing issuing and adding 12% of your top-line revenue to your bottom line. I'll be around for today and tomorrow, and if you want to talk payment orchestration, how to add that $120 million per billion to your bottom line, happy to be here. And I hope you have a great show, a great dinner tonight for those of you who are here for the first time, I can guarantee you that if it goes like it usually goes, it's going to be very both interesting and entertaining. And with that, thank you for your time. That was 10 minutes, and I wish you a pleasant lunch. Thank you. Thank you, Kristian.
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