Russia's S7 Airlines revealed that its blockchain platform, developed in partnership with Alfa-Bank, sold $1 million in tickets in July.
“Thanks to this new technology, now it’s easier for our agents to work directly with the airline, which allowed us to expand our own S7 Airlines sales network. Within this year, we are planning to deploy first online agents, whose work would comply with the NDC standard, on the platform,” Ekaterina Dmitruk, S7 Group sales director, said in a press release.
Launched in 2017, the private blockchain platform has boosted the processing rate of payments while reducing the amount of paperwork.
“The number of operations is growing every month. Since January, the amount of payments made on the blockchain platform has grown tenfold. In addition to the number of transactions, the number of other processes that we try to automate on our platform is also growing. This was largely made possible by the Hyperledger Fabric platform, which not only provides stable network performance, but also allows us to safely and privately store data of different members,” said Nikolai Mukhanov, S7 Techlab executive director.
“The good results of our project with S7 Airlines shows that the blockchain technology creates value and is largely decisive for the B2B market. Agents left behind the guarantees and deposits, reduced transaction costs and now can make payments 24/7. We see great potential in the use of smart contracts and external business logic in accounting and paperwork in various sectors of the economy. Alfa-Bank will continue going in this direction with S7 Airlines,” added Pavel Ryazanov, director of transaction business at Alfa-Bank.
And in August 2018, S7 became the first airline in Russia to refuel an aircraft using smart contracts based on the blockchain technology with the operator Gazpromneft-Aero and Alfa-Bank, with the process of debiting funds and transferring documents between the fuel supplier and the airline taking only 60 seconds.
