UATP Chief Marketing Officer, Wendy Ward & Chief Financial Officer, Michael Marrone at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Asia 2025

Transcript

Wendy Ward:So I think the first thing is that airlines are actually having a payment strategy now, and intrinsic within that is the trends you're asking about, such as buy now, pay later, digital wallets, CPoI, card present over internet, you know, Really every kind of form of payment that exists, which is over 350, I think now, is becoming the norm.

Michael Marrone:And we're seeing the rise of more usage of virtual card. Virtual card is— we're seeing a lot of play there. And it's not only just a different way to make payment. The value that you get from virtual card is some fraud protection, things like that, that, you know, you're getting a little bit more of a secure payment type with UATP virtual cards.

Wendy Ward:Geographically, you're going to see Southeast Asia explode with forms of payment. I feel like every month somebody is announcing a new form of payment. It's not just WeChat Pay or Alipay here anymore. You've got hundreds. And then Latin America, huge area for growth in addition to Africa, because you're going to have some of that leapfrogging effect where people don't have the traditional bank accounts or credit cards. Everything has gone digital. And so these are real areas of growth opportunity.

Michael Marrone:I think that it depends on the region, obviously, and each region has their own type of payment that needs to be considered by the airlines. It might be a digital— one digital wallet company in one region is different than the digital wallet company in another country. So the airlines need to consider where are their customers located. It's just not in their home market. So they need to consider those types of payments all over the world, really.

Wendy Ward:And I think across the globe, you're also going to have more aggregators. So instead of, you know, like PayPal or every single direct connect that needs to be done, you are— we are seeing aggregators grow that can offer hundreds of forms of payment by a flip of a switch. So we've had a few things that we've announced just recently. As I mentioned earlier, Card Present Over Internet. with our partner Burbank. That is brand new. We're just rolling that out. And then the reason we've been in Singapore all week is we have launched intra-India settlement. So we have an INR solution now that we're very excited about. And Michael's worked massively on this. I'll let you take it from him.

Michael Marrone:Yeah, thanks. So we have partnered with a company in India called Razorpay to affect the settlement. UATP does not handle cash flow at all. We don't touch money. So we needed to have a partner within India to handle that cash flow for us. And so we're providing our merchant base in India the ability to settle their airline tickets in INR. So any organization or any airline that flies into India that has a presence or that has payables within the borders of India, they can settle those tickets in Indian rupees. So they have a bank account with Indian rupees that they can then use for payables. So again, we don't touch money. We've been working on this for many years. Our partner Razorpay is the one that will affect the settlement. You know, fully regulated organization with the Reserve Bank of India. Really exciting. So it's again, it's not just for airlines within the borders of India. It's any airline that comes into India that, that comes and has a need for INR. So brand new for us. Again, we've been working on it for several years. We look forward to seeing success there and helping an economy that's, I think, number 4, number 5 now and growing. 1.4 billion people. You know, we want to help that market, serve, serve that market and do things there.

Wendy Ward:Understand your cost of payment. And if you need a partner, go to somebody that has the expertise in it. There's a lot of people that are coming into travel payments that have come from either retailing or gaming. This is the most complex vertical there is for payment. And it's not just, oh, we're going to accept a credit card and it's that easy. We're going to accept a digital form of payment. It's much more than that. So, A, understand it, build your strategy, partner with the right people.

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