Payment Optimisation for Airlines

2% increase in approval rate can generate, on average, $1M monthly revenue without a retry

The United States and Europe have a significant variance in approval rates mainly since European regulation is more complex with a big focus on transaction security (for example PSD2). In addition, European transactions for airlines are predominantly cross-border adding to the complexity of the ecosystem.

Insufficient funds is the top contributor towards Card Not Present (CNP) declines for airlines making up 45% of all declines. These types of declines are driven by cardholders and can be difficult to resolve.

To combat this:

1. Incentivise your card holders to use credit cards as they are statistically far less likely to get declines compared to debit cards
2. Offer as many varied forms of payment as possible to your cardholders, including Buy Now Pay Later or similar cost splitting schemes

Behavioural scheme fees are mandated to improve the payment ecosystem and transaction quality by tackling inefficient behaviours, such as excessive authorisations.

You can achieve compliance with these programs by:

1. Ensuring the correct flow between authorisation and clearing messages (potential reduction of $0.01-$0.05 per transaction)
2. Introducing Payment Tokens or performing 3DS (potential reduction of 0.025% per transaction)

Benefit from lower processing costs by ensuring optimum transaction routing

Domestic transactions on average cost less than cross border, so by making sure you have legal presence in the right countries is key to benefit from the cheapest processing costs.

• Match MID country to card issued country
  • For example, if MID is in GBR but 65% of cards issued in FRA consider routing the transaction via a MID in FRA to increase domestic presence