Travel tech companies TravelgateX and PayParc have made a deal to create a B2B digital wallet, operating via API integration and available for any buyer or seller using TravelgateX, a press release says.
The release cites the complications in the travel industry due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has rendered much of the industry useless with shutdowns and people’s fears over potentially catching the virus.
Virtual cards, the release notes, are a way of getting around financial complications resulting from the loss of insurance coverage while the risk is high and business is bad. Virtual cards help sidestep the problem of navigating a mire of bank guarantees an online travel agency might have to do. However, problems like high costs, fraud risk and manual work taking time away from other tasks still exist.
With PayParc and TravelgateX’s digital wallet, the risk issue is done away with, as transactions are moved automatically in the digital wallet rather than manually between buyers and sellers.
Becky French, VP of product management for Sabre, told PYMNTS in a January 2020 interview that virtual cards can reduce the risk of fraud by inherently being a one-to-one transaction, with a lot of customizable controls to dictate what the platform can do.
PayParc specifically touts its ability to read booking data and convert it to automatic payment execution as a way to help save costs.
“The platform is an interface of our international payment network,” said founder Taylan Taspinar, according to the press release. “The payments are executed only through the booking data received by API and are assigned to the specific booking along with the status of the transaction. The platform runs in parallel with the regular reservation flow and verifies each transaction by relating it to the reservation data, notifies each party, and prepares reconciliation reports.”
Pedro Camara, CEO of TravelgateX, said the agreement had ensured that any company affiliated with TravelgateX “can pay instantly and securely through PayParc, to any of its providers.”
“In this situation of lack of credit, we can guarantee these payments in the safest way possible,” he said, according to the release.
French told PYMNTS that the travel field was particularly volatile due to things like changed flights or plans, which can be mitigated through the increased control and visibility of a virtual card.
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