News from the Wire

Outpayce, HSBC offer multi-currency airline payments

Thursday, February 22, 2024 — 12:44:08 (EST)

22 February 2024 -- Outpayce and HSBC partner to help airlines price fares in travelers’ preferred currency. Japan Airlines is the first carrier to secure HSBC’s globally competitive FX rates through the new partnership. The move comes as new research shows a third of airlines plan to offer Multi-Currency Pricing Today, airlines often price their products in a default currency, rather than the traveler’s local or preferred currency. This impacts the shopping experience and can lower purchase rates as travelers leave the airline’s website to perform a manual Foreign Exchange (FX) conversion. That’s why more than a third of airlines responding to a recent Amadeus survey confirmed they plan to offer fares in multiple currencies within the next twelve months.

It is against this backdrop that Outpayce from Amadeus is expanding its current offering by partnering with HSBC so the global bank can make its competitive FX rates available to airlines through Outpayce’s FX Box Multi Currency Pricing (MCP) solution. Japan Airlines is the first carrier to offer its passengers multi-currency pricing through the Outpayce and HSBC partnership.

With this HSBC partnership, FX Box MCP has further extended its coverage to over 170 different currencies, enabling airlines to price their fares based on the needs of each individual traveler. If the customer chooses to pay in their own currency, a FX transaction occurs behind the scenes based on HSBC’s competitive rates with full reconciliation to the airline’s revenue accounting systems.

The approach provides an alternative for travelers that would otherwise rely on their own card - issuing bank to undertake this service on an ‘after-the-fact’ basis. Typically, travelers only realise how much such conversions have cost when they check their bank statement.

The new partnership with HSBC delivers several benefits for airlines:

Increases the amount of real-time FX rates available via FX Box MCP to 170-plus currencies

The ability to define the margin charged for providing FX services

The ability to internalize FX spreads from cross-border payments

Complete control over the look at feel of how multi-currency prices are displayed on their websites or apps.

Damian Alonso, Head of Commercial and Partnerships at Outpayce, said: “We are thrilled to announce our partnership with HSBC. By offering consumers the option to pay in their preferred currency and ensuring there are no hidden fees, we hope to make shopping for travel easier and more enjoyable. We know travelers welcome this with our research showing that nine-in-every-ten travelers would be more likely to choose one airline over another if given the option to pay in their preferred currency.”

Gregory Edwards, Global Head of Transactional FX, HSBC: “For global merchants such as airlines with significant cross-border sales, it’s really important to them to offer prices in the local currency of their customers. Outpayce’s FX Box solution makes it much easier to understand how much you’re paying for an air fare, enabling airlines to take control of the entire FX experience on their websites. With our globally competitive rates, airlines are ready to go.”

Notes to the editors: About Outpayce

Amadeus makes the experience of travel better for everyone, everywhere by inspiring innovation, partnerships and responsibility to people, places and planet.

As a wholly-owned company, Outpayce from Amadeus is the next step in scaling the Amadeus payments business with fresh investment in talent, an open API platform and a license to deliver new regulated payment services.

Outpayce delivers smoother end-to-end travel experiences making travel payments simple. Our open platform that connects FinTech and banking service providers to the entire travel ecosystem allows customers and travelers to easily benefit from new advances in payments.

Outpayce Xchange Payment Platform (XPP) solves challenges in areas like authentication, acceptance and foreign exchange (FX) for travel merchants and gives access to partners that resolve areas like chargebacks and fraud management to offer a smoother overall experience for the traveler. In the B2B payments space, Outpayce orchestrates payments with a range of virtual cards, currencies and payment methods to optimize cost, acceptance and agility wherever a travel seller needs to pay a supplier.

Outpayce delivers an end-to-end experience by continuing to work with all Amadeus’ teams and embedding its capabilities in all of Amadeus' applications. The future is travel simply paid. To find out more about Outpayce, visit www.outpayce.com. Follow us on: LinkedIn

The Green Sheet Inc. is now a proud affiliate of Bankcard Life, a premier community that provides industry-leading training and resources for payment professionals. Click here for more information: bankcardlife.com?orid=33533&opid=1 .

Source: Company press release.