Payments strategy for a global airline
Developed a strategy for this international airline’s payments operations, shaping a potential £50m revenue uplift and £10-20m cost reduction.
We assessed the customer journey vs. their future needs and developed initiatives to significantly upgrade the customer experience, embed a multi-acquirer strategy, reduce fees to existing acquirers, and define a new payments system architecture.
Context
This major airline was handling £12bn of payments across 60 markets, without yet having placed its payments operations under strategic scrutiny. In the light of new payments regulations, they now sought to develop a future payments strategy and assess the implications of that for their payments systems architecture and organisation.
In particular, there was a sense that the customer experience could be radically improved to reduce “drop-off rates”, and that the offer needed to include new payments platforms and methods. Furthermore, it was strongly believed that better deals could be made with multiple payment providers.
Approach
Based in a thorough understanding of the key trends in the global payments industry, and drawing on a significant internal dataset of transactions conducted, the team assessed the current customer journey vs. their future needs, the current operating model and payments system architecture. They developed initiatives to increase revenue, by optimising the customer experience and working with acquirers to raise acceptance rates. They also identified significant cost reduction opportunities by renegotiating better routing and deals with acquirers.
They went on to identify the organisation, process and systems enablers needed to implement the strategy.
Impact
The project identified opportunities to increase revenue by over £50m and reduce costs by £10-20m.
An implementation approach was set up to realise these benefits, implement a new payments system architecture, and move towards the new payments organisation.