Alex Mifsud, co-founder and CEO of embedded finance platform Weavr, discusses the state of the industry, some of 2025’s key themes and predictions for 2026.

Prior to founding Weavr, Alex co-founded Entropay, launching Europe’s first consumer virtual prepaid card.
Later, Alex co-founded Ixaris, a B2B payments technology company that pioneered the use of virtual cards in the Insurance and Travel value chains.
Some of Alex’s biggest achievements as Weavr CEO have included raising a $40m Series-A round, acquiring digital-payments platform, Comma, and most recently securing an EMI licence from the Maltese Financial Services Authority.
Now, with airlines going bust from time to time, the refund process for customers is often complex and long. Weavr’s embedded finance solution for travel agents is simplifying this process and making it much easier for customers.

​​Q1. Evolution of payments in the travel sector

I’m showing my age here, but it’s been over two decades since I launched Entropay with Visa in 2002, and travel became an early - and totally unexpected - use case. Customers discovered they could avoid low cost carrier surcharges by using virtual prepaid cards, and travel agents quickly followed to improve their margins and automate processes. Creating a new card per booking gave a single reference across the distribution chain, making software driven order processing far easier. As commercial virtual cards emerged, agents also benefited from issuer rebates. These forces - surcharge avoidance, rebates and automation - drove adoption through the 2010s. At Ixaris Solutions we helped large agents optimise payment economics, often improving gross margins by over 20%. Airline failures like Flybe and Thomas Cook added another lesson: using cards rather than traditional settlement systems offered a route to recover funds, markedly reducing the financial impact on agents.

Q2. What problems Weavr solves today
The travel industry has led embedded finance by necessity. Margins are thin, volumes high and value flows complex, yet payments are still far from solved. Cost and risk remain the two big challenges, and Weavr provides tools that are purpose built to address both. We orchestrate payment flows across virtual card, wallet and account based systems so each travel business can optimise how it gets paid and how it pays suppliers. A bed bank, for instance, can collect cheaply into its own wallet while using virtual cards for cross border settlement and earning rebates. The same approach strengthens supplier failure protection. By linking the consumer’s card payment to the virtual card used to pay the airline - and capturing the right data - agents gain the same protections travellers rely on. It removes one of the industry’s most painful asymmetries and cuts reconciliation problems, manual processes and refund friction.

Q3. How Weavr improves refunds and customer trust
Today, travellers are rightly protected, but agents often fund refunds from their own cash when an airline collapses, then wait months or years to recover anything. That undermines liquidity, service quality and ultimately customer trust. Weavr connects issuing to the existing acquiring stack of travel SaaS providers and acquirers, so airline tickets can be paid using platform issued virtual cards backed by the same chargeback protections consumers rely on. When a carrier fails, refunds become orderly and predictable rather than a scramble. Agents stay liquid because scheme protections now work for them as well as the traveller, and customers see refunds handled quickly and confidently rather than waiting behind an intermediary that is financially stuck. With BSP processing billions in refunds each year, the scale of the problem is obvious - and solving it restores trust where disruption currently creates uncertainty.

Q4. EMI licence and Comma acquisition
The EMI licence gives Weavr the regulatory foundation to provide safeguarded accounts, cards and other core financial services across Europe, alongside the broad network of financial partners already integrated into our platform. It also gives us the ability to secure access to sophisticated banking infrastructure from larger partners - card issuance, currency management, working capital facilities and more. With this mix of payment technology, licensing and banking capability, travel platforms can finally build on a single compliant layer rather than stitching together separate providers and hoping those pieces hold during disruption. The Comma acquisition strengthens our open banking capabilities, letting platforms initiate payments as well as collect funds, bringing low cost bank to bank transfers into the same native flow as cards. Together, these capabilities give travel firms a complete financial toolkit to embed directly into their product - taking payments from travellers, paying suppliers and keeping everything in sync.

Q5. Business travel trends heading into 2026
Business travel has a long history of following where consumers lead. As consumers do, employees now expect convenience and an experience that anticipates their needs in context, while corporates want less admin and more control. This is pushing booking, approvals and expenses into one continuous workflow rather than isolated tools. At the same time, more spend happens during the trip itself - taxis, meals, incidentals - which forces platforms to manage what happens on the ground, not just the pre-trip booking. Margins remain thin, so resilience and cashflow protection are becoming commercial priorities rather than back office concerns. And with global business travel expected to reach well over a trillion dollars, a huge share of it in trip spend, platforms that manage both the booking and the spend will be in the strongest position.

Q6. Role of embedded finance in resilience and efficiency
Embedded finance brings together a set of financial capabilities and automation tools that can transform the cost and risk exposure of running a travel business. It covers everything from how platforms take and make payments to how they fund working capital and manage forex and supplier risk. For example, aligning the moment money is collected from travellers with the moment it is paid to airlines and other suppliers dramatically reduces exposure when disruption hits. Moving more flows onto embedded rails also strips out manual reconciliations, chargebacks and payout complexities, freeing teams to focus on customers rather than firefighting. With joined up processes from collection to supplier payment, lenders are finally able to provide working capital that improves the efficiency of the entire supply chain. The net effect is predictable cashflow, lower operational overheads and greater resilience. With the vast majority of SaaS platforms planning to embed finance, travel has more to gain than most.

Q7. Biggest opportunities for innovation
I’ll focus on payments and finance. The travel industry has been an early adopter of digital payments, but foundational changes are underway. Real time bank payments and open banking standards are enabling highly efficient B2C and B2B transactions. Stablecoins can already reduce the time and cost of cross border flows, even if they cannot quite remove forex spread. And agentic AI will fundamentally change how buyers and suppliers negotiate and transact, leading to massively scalable travel firms operating with very small human teams where the back office is concerned - and likely beyond that too. For agents to transact, payment protocols and systems - including how failure, fraud and error are handled - need to adapt. The travel value chain is complex, so this won’t happen overnight, but the forces are big enough to pose adapt or die challenges. At Weavr, we’re putting in place the pieces to support firms through this transition.

Q8. Advice to travel leaders rethinking digital infrastructure
Treat payments as a critical design aspect of your business, not a back office afterthought. First, design your payments systems to be economically efficient. Online travel will remain a low margin business, with transparency only increasing as AI accelerates comparison, so few players can afford not to optimise the costs of taking and making payments. Secondly, how money moves is fundamental to resilience and customer experience, especially when things go wrong. When you rebuild your platform, choose partners that help you embed and operate financial services inside your own stack so you own the roadmap, the data and the economics. And above all, avoid the trap of stitching together separate systems for pay ins, wallets and payouts. A single, clean financial layer makes you faster, safer and far better prepared for the next airline failure that tests the entire industry.

Q. You have been a pioneer in virtual cards and embedded finance for more than a decade. How would you describe the evolution of payments in the travel sector over that time?

A. I’m showing my age here, but it’s been over two decades - I launched Entropay with Visa in 2002 and at the time we had no idea how virtual prepaid cards would turn out to be used.  Travel was an early use-case, totally unexpected, and an example of customer-led innovation - customers discovered, and shouted about it on social media, that by using virtual prepaid cards they could avoid surcharges low cost carriers charged to credit cards at the time.  Soon enough travel agents started doing the same thing for much the same reasons - ultimately to improve their margins.  In doing so, they also discovered the automation benefits of virtual cards: by creating a new card for every booking they were able to get a single reference to the booking transaction across the travel distribution chain, the card number being that reference.  This made it much easier to build software to automate the processing of travel orders by travel agents.  Eventually, adoption of commercial card products in the form of virtual cards also offered rebates from the card issuers.  These three benefits: avoiding surcharges where relevant, earning rebates where the airline allowed, and the ease of automation all drove adoption in the 2010s.  We launched Ixaris Solutions specifically to help large travel agents optimise their payments economics, and were able - through a mix of surcharge avoidance and earning of rebates to improve gross margins for travel agents often by over 20%. In addition, a fact that we discovered in the wake of airline failures like Flybe and later Thomas Cook, the use of cards to pay airlines - instead of airline industry methods like IATA Billing and Settlement Plan - provide a guarantee of getting the money back ultimately to give back to customers.  The widespread use of virtual cards in the industry markedly reduced the impact of these and other airline failures on the travel agents involved.

Q. What specific problems in travel is Weavr solving today and how does embedded finance change the experience for both agents and travellers?

A. The travel industry has led the way in embedded finance by necessity.  Online travel is largely a low margin industry that has to manage complex value flows at high volumes in a complex ecosystem, which has driven adoption of highly integrated digital payments systems.  Nevertheless, payments is far from a problem that can be considered solved. Two challenges stand out: cost and risk, and Weavr has unique tools to address both.
Let’s start with cost. Wholesale or B2B travel payments are carried out via virtual cards, a range of cross-border cross-currency transfers as well as payments solutions run by supplier-led bodies such IATA and UATP. Each has their place, but none optimises for all the requirements: transaction costs, working capital, and protection against supplier failure.
Weavr’s approach is to offer a means to orchestrate payment flows across virtual-card-based, wallet-based and accounts-based payment systems.  This enables any travel company wherever it is in the value chain to optimise how it gets paid and how it pays its suppliers.  The specific mix of to deliver optimal economics will depend on that company’s place in the value chain, its operating model and its market power: Weavr’s platform makes it possible to implement and integrate the optimal flows.  For instance, a hospitality aggregator - or bed bank - can provide wallets for each travel agents to enable it to get paid quickly and cheaply by transferring funds to its own wallet, while it uses virtual cards for cross border settlements with hotels worldwide, and thereby benefitting from card rebates.
This approach also forms the basis of how Weavr enables supplier-failure risk to be managed more effectively, particularly in the case of bookings like air travel which are paid for at the time of booking rather than at the time of use.  For instance, Weavr allows travel agents - and the merchant acquirers who serve them - to directly link card payments they receive from consumers for air travel to virtual cards they use to pay the airlines which - when coupled with the recording of the right data - provide an effective guarantee against airline failure.
That single change removes the most painful asymmetry in travel - agents carrying financial liability for services they don’t deliver. It also cleans up supplier payments and reconciliation because every booking is ring fenced instead of pushed through mixed settlement routes. The result is less risk and fewer manual processes for agents, and smoother refunds and adjustments for travellers because the platform stays liquid even when disruption hits. With IATA’s BSP settling over 240 billion US dollars a year, the scale of the problem is obvious.

 

Q. With airlines occasionally collapsing, refunds can become complicated and slow. How is Weavr redesigning this process and what impact does this have on customer trust?

A. Today, travellers are rightly protected - but agents usually fund refunds from their own cash when an airline fails, then wait months or years to recover anything. That undermines liquidity, service quality and ultimately customer trust. Weavr connects issuing to the existing acquiring stack of travel SaaS providers and acquirers, so airline tickets can be paid using platform issued virtual cards backed by the same chargeback protections consumers rely on. When a carrier collapses, it turns the refund process from a scramble into something orderly and predictable. Agents stay liquid because the card scheme protections now work for them as well as the traveller, and customers see refunds handled quickly and confidently instead of waiting behind an intermediary that is financially stuck. BSP processed 19.1 billion US dollars in refunds alone in 2024 - proof that refund flows are huge when disruption hits.

Q. You recently secured an EMI licence and completed the acquisition of Comma. How do these milestones strengthen your offer for the travel industry?

A. The EMI licence gives Weavr the regulatory foundation to provide safeguarded accounts, cards and other core financial services across Europe alongside the broad range of financial partners that are integrated into its platform today.  Through its licence Weavr is also able to secure (and therefore offer to travel firms) access to sophisticated banking and payments infrastructure provided by larger banking partners covering card issuance, currency management, working capital provision and so forth . With Weavr’s comprehensive mix of payment technology, licence and banking capabilities, travel platforms can finally build on a single compliant layer rather than stitching together different providers and hoping the pieces hold during disruption. The Comma acquisition adds real strength on the open banking side, letting platforms initiate payments as well as collect funds with low cost, bank to bank payments as naturally as they take cards. Together, these capabilities give travel businesses a complete financial toolkit they can embed inside their product - taking payments from travellers, paying suppliers, and keeping funds and data in sync.

 

Q. What are you seeing in business travel right now and how do you expect demand and behaviour to shift in 2026?

A. Business travel has a long history of following where consumers lead.  As consumers do, employees now expect convenience and a customer experience that anticipates their needs in context. Corporates want less admin and more control, which is pushing booking, approvals and expenses into one continuous workflow instead of isolated tools. At the same time, more spend is happening during the trip itself - taxis, meals, incidentals - which forces platforms to manage what happens on the ground, not just the pre-trip booking. Margins across the value chain remain thin, so resilience and cashflow protection are becoming commercial priorities rather than back office concerns. And with global business travel expected to reach 1.48 trillion US dollars in 2024, a huge share of which is in trip spend, platforms that manage both the booking and the spend will be in the strongest position.

 

Q. What role will embedded finance play in helping travel businesses improve resilience, liquidity and operational efficiency over the next few years?

A. Embedded finance brings together a range of financial capability and payments automation tools that can transform the cost and risk exposure of running a travel business.  These financial features range from how to take and make payments, how to fund working capital, as well as how to manage forex exposure and supplier risk.
For instance, to manage supplier risk, travel platforms and acquirers can align the moment they collect money from travellers with the moment they pay airlines and other suppliers. That single alignment dramatically reduces exposure when disruption hits. Moving more flows onto embedded financial rails also strips out manual reconciliations, chargebacks and payout processes, freeing teams to focus on customers rather than firefighting.
By providing joined up payments processes end-to-end, from collection to supplier payments, it becomes viable for lenders and working capital providers to offer funding which makes the supply chain operate more efficiently and therefore powers growth and competitiveness. 
The net effect is predictable cashflow, lower operational overheads and greater resilience during shocks such as airline failures. The direction of travel is clear - Weavr’s recent research revealed that 92% of SaaS firms now intend to embed finance in some form - and the travel industry has more to gain than most because its risk is tied directly to how money moves.

Q. Where do you see the biggest opportunities for innovation across the wider travel value chain?

A. I will focus on payments and finance related matters.  The travel industry has been an early adopter of digital payments - from card checkout all the way through virtual cards. 
In the meantime, however, foundational changes have been happening: real-time bank payments and open banking standards are enabling highly efficient payments - both B2C and B2B.  Stablecoins can already reduce the time and cost of cross-border flows, even if not quite remove the cost of forex spread.  And agentic AI will fundamentally change how both buyers and suppliers negotiate and transact, leading to massively scalable travel firms operating with very small human teams, at least, where the back-office is concerned but most likely beyond that too.  For agents to transact, payment protocols and systems - and ways of dealing with failure, fraud and error in payments - need to be adapted. 
The travel value chain is complex and so these changes won’t happen overnight, but they are big enough to pose ‘adapt or die’ challenges to incumbents.  At Weavr, we are putting in place all the pieces to support travel firms along this journey.  If we are right about these forces and these trends, then we expect to be powering - from a payments and finance perspective - the transition and disruption that these changes will bring about.
Q. As someone who has built multiple successful payments companies, what is the one piece of advice you would give to travel leaders who are rethinking their digital infrastructure?

A. Treat payments as a critical design aspect of your business, and not a back office afterthought.
First, to pick what should be obvious, design your payments systems to be economically efficient.  Online travel, with the price and product transparency that is only getting more so with the advent of AI, is going to remain a low margin business.  Few players in the value chain can afford not to optimise the costs of taking and making payments.
Secondly, how money moves is fundamental to resilience, customer experience (especially when things go wrong). When you rebuild your platform, choose partners that help you embed and operate financial services inside your own stack so you own the roadmap, the data and the economics. And above all, avoid the trap of stitching together separate systems for pay-ins, wallets and payouts. A single, clean financial layer makes you faster, safer and far better prepared for the next airline failure that tests the entire industry.