Airlines face significant challenges in sales and settlement reconciliation due to multiple sales channels and global operations.

They often deal with several acquiring banks across different countries and the complexity of managing changes or refunds to bookings, which can be made up to a year in advance.

These factors make it difficult to accurately match sales to incoming payments, especially when some airlines still rely on manual methods like Excel spreadsheets.

Ineffective payment reconciliation creates high volumes of manual work for airlines, can lead to issues for finance teams and can potentially result in flying passengers with unpaid tickets.

That’s why Outpayce from Amadeus worked closely with one of the leading network airlines to understand the challenge and build an entirely new automated reconciliation system from the ground up to transform its airline customers’ back-office efficiency.

After several years of close collaboration and co-development, the leading network airline is now scaling the deployment of Outpayce’s Reconciliation module across its operations, and Outpayce is making the solution available to the wider airline industry.

The new system draws on Outpayce’s native, synchronised, access to airline sales data as well as payments capture data to deliver a holistic reconciliation approach that automates the matching of sales to payments received, providing a clear and reliable picture that supports improved accounting.

Industry-leading reconciliation ratios are achieved thanks to a more comprehensive data feed and smart matching algorithms.

These capabilities mean the new system can reconcile, spot discrepancies, and even understand the chargeback status of each payment, to act fast and protect revenue.

For instance, if airlines can easily identify all tickets that haven’t been paid for, they can act quickly and avoid instances of flying passengers for free. 

Finance teams are provided with greater clarity on revenues received, and can quickly explain and correct mismatches, supporting improved accounting processes.

Jean-Christophe Lacour, global head of product management and delivery, Outpayce said: “Through close collaboration with our airline customers we’ve been able to re-imagine payment reconciliation from the ground up and I’m excited we’re making this new capability available to the wider industry.

“Automating reconciliation for airlines represents an important step in our ambition to provide the industry’s most complete suite for end-to-end payment optimisation.

“At Outpayce we are committed to transforming airline payments, including complex pain points like reconciliation.” 

The new Reconciliation module is available through Outpayce’s award-winning Xchange Payments Platform, which is used by leading airlines to orchestrate their global payment flows by intelligently routing each transaction to maximise acceptance rates, reduce fraud and ensure cost-effective payments.

Outpayce supports the travel industry to process more than $180 billion in payments each year.