Locally relevant, omnichannel and targeting fraud is one European airline’s approach to payments

When European airline, Transavia, embarked on an overhaul of its digital architecture back in 2012, it had clear objectives with respect to payments.

It wanted an omnichannel, multi device approach, says Roy Scheerder, the airline’s chief commercial officer who explains that in the past 12 months mobile traffic has doubled to account for 50% of overall transactions. Of those half are tablets, half smart phones, and the airline has introduced a responsive design to ensure that the payments page adjusts to the size of the screen.

Another central objective was to be locally relevant, as local payment methods across Europe “vary a lot”.  Interestingly, credit cards are not the preferred payment method. In the Netherlands, for example, 40% of travel payments are made using iDEAL, while in Germany the SOFORT is responsible for 30% of payments.

“We wanted to boost our ability to support local payment systems as well as credit cards Paypal and so on,” Scheerder explains.  Transavia is also looking at an Apple Pay launch to meet the needs of Mac users when the payment option becomes available in Europe.

A major consideration in choosing a new payment platform was fraud which, according to Scheerder is “truly organised crime on a massive scale”. This is not about a single consumer with a stolen credit card and it’s usually linked to some other kind of fraud, such as selling the tickets to refugees trying to get into Europe, he says.

Organised crime

One of the challenges with fraud, however, is weeding out the good and willing customers from the bad. 3-D secure, an XML-based protocol designed to be an additional security layer for online credit and debit card transactions,has been one way to do this. But, as explains Scheerder, customers really don’t like it to the point that it reduces conversions and impacts sales.

With its new system, Transavia is able to identify individual transaction attempts that are high risk based on number of factors that include: location, day of the week, transaction value, time and so on.

“It a sophisticated evaluation and high-risk transactions are then placed in a grey zone, where 3-D secure can be applied,” says Scheerder.

A platform that would integrate with its core reservations system namely Amadeus and Navitaire, which account for 50% of global bookings, was another strategic objective. And the result is that today payments for a given airline are automatically integrated into the ledger, revenue accounting and reservation system.

In choosing a payments technology partner Scheerder said they didn’t even go through a formal request for proposal process. “We fell in love with the Adyen product which fit all our requirements. It was a straightforward decision and we didn’t look at any other providers,” he says.

Given the pace of change in the world of payments, Transavia says it will continue to innovate. Going forward the business is considering implementing tokenised payments in order to deliver a ‘one-touch’ payment experience for its customers.

Here more about how Transavia is leveraging technology in a digital world at The Connected Traveller 2015 22– 23 October where Harm van Hees, the airlines head of E-commerce will be speaking