IBS Software Vice President and Regional Head – Europe & Africa Ben Simmons

Transcript

Ben Simmons:IBS produces software for the airline industry and other industries in the travel sector. Certainly, the last 2 years have been something of a challenge for the customers. As an IT vendor, it's been incredibly fast-paced and moving. Without wishing to dwell too much on the COVID situation, this has been a really intense period of change for the industry, and certainly the transformations in terms of the businesses, the people, the organizations has been profound. So technology has had its role to play in that. We deliver software that manages flight operations. Cargo systems, loyalty systems, and others too. And we've been pretty heavily implicated in in those in those sectors in the last couple of years. Certainly, I think it's been quite inevitable. Like I've mentioned, it's been very hard for airlines to go through such a traumatic last few years without technology playing a very important role in that. So whether it's at the airports, for example, with with biometric systems, or even much earlier in the customer. Customer journey when it comes to flexible ticket changes, you've seen a profound change of policies and technologies had its role to play. So we in IBS, for example, saw an incredible uptick in demand for our cargo solutions. Cargo proved to be a real lifeline for many of our airline customers during the COVID crisis, and same with the flight operations, which is so heavily disrupted. Whether it's even just delivering vaccines and test kits and the disruption to the crews with COVID it's had a profound effect. So IBS has seen a lot of business and we've been relatively fortunate to be able to support the industry in these areas. And other ones that were much more interesting and unexpected, for example, loyalty. Airlines are very keen to make sure that their brand stayed relevant to their customer base and provide other opportunities for income, and loyalty was one way of doing that. So again, that's another sector where in IBS we were fortunate to have the solutions that supported our customers there. That was interesting because I've talked about the rearview mirror, haven't I, of what's happened in the last 18 or 24 months. But looking to the future, as we heard at the CAPA event, there is a real, I think, scratching of heads. There's a real rethink about the role technology needs to play. Certainly in the digital transformation session, it was very interesting to hear the role that One Order is expected to play in the future and the move away from legacy platforms to a much more customer and B2C type driven environment. And IBS is certainly investing in this space, and we're in discussions with a number of airlines about how we can progress in the one order space. And that's certainly one of the areas of the future, for the future, where we see our applications bring real value to the airline industry. We've always seen IT investment in the airline industry around that 5% mark, and it is relatively low as an industry, but we remain positive and confident. And why is that? It's because I think some of the profound changes that have taken place mean you can't fall back to the way that you used to do things. I'll give you a couple of examples. First of all, as things stand today, airlines are sitting on about $20 billion worth of ticket refunds according to IATA's estimate. And so solutions, for example, that provide a digital wallet like the one IBS has just launched to help try and keep that revenues within the airline and transfer it into other forms of credit is extremely interesting to airlines. So that's a short-term, I would say, almost logical investment that they could make. But I think more medium to long term, the intrinsic challenges the airlines have got are around— first of all, they've had to restructure their organizations, their strategic objectives have changed, they have much fewer people with which to do the business, and therefore there's an incredible demand for automation and where technology can play a real role. So again, that's really important. It will help drive the automation and IT support for a number of functions and processes and ways of operating where before perhaps there was more frontline staff. So I gave the example earlier of biometrics. There's much less intervention at the airport for people, but that also takes place at other— in other parts of the business that are perhaps hidden from customer view. I think the biggest challenge is going to be, as a software provider, you always try and provide a generic suite of software that's as compatible as possible with as many different types of customers. And when your customers are having a fundamental rethink about what their business needs are, you can get— you have to talk and engage and have some very intense conversations about the airline strategy. What was known a year ago and was semantic perhaps is now totally challenged and being rethought at the airline level. So you can't build software, design software, and deliver software in the way that you used to. You have to engage at a slightly different level with the airlines in a much more collaborative way. And that actually has been quite refreshing. I think we've gone from a little bit of a vendor and customer perspective into a little bit more of a collaborative mode with a lot of our customers who are trying to find their way forward with us rather than just telling us we need this or we need that. It's very much a case of how can we fix this business problem and work together to resolve that. I feel that what was— what has gone in the past is no longer solid foundations for building the future. So yes, everyone's having to rethink, everyone's having to reset, and I think that digital transformation panel really brought that forward. Also, what was interesting was to hear the way that new entrants are coming into the market, and, you know, they're trying to attack the business from a different angle. So you have to try and be much, much more creative, I think, and take much less for granted.

Copyright policy: All transcripts on this site are the copyright of CAPA - Centre for Aviation. Our reproduction policy is as follows: you may quote up to 400 words of any transcript on the condition that you attribute the transcript to CAPA - Centre for Aviation and link to the original video page. All other use is prohibited. While we aim for 100% accuracy in the transcript, there may be some minor transcribing errors.