Virgin Atlantic, CellPoint Digital Form Payment Orchestration Partnership

Virgin Atlantic has formed a partnership with airline-focused payment orchestration company CellPoint Digital.

The collaboration is designed to make transactions for travelers on the British air carrier seamless and more secure, the two companies said Wednesday (Jan. 17).

“By partnering with CellPoint Digital, Virgin Atlantic will see reduced transaction costs by leveraging intelligent routing capabilities, gain more control over their payment processes and acquirer relationships, and centralize the management of their entire payment ecosystem through a single unified platform,” the companies said in a news release.

As covered here last year in “A Primer on Payments Orchestration: What It Is — and Is Not,” payments orchestration is a key resource for businesses looking to contend with the increasing demands of digital payment options.

“Payments orchestration leverages connections with multiple payment services to allow merchants and aggregators to connect easily to a wide range of independent payment-related services,” that report said. “This allows merchants and independent software vendors to scale quickly and support new geographies, partners, business models and customers by onboarding new services promptly.”

In the case of Virgin Atlantic, payment orchestration allowed the airline to tackle two key challenges: managing a growing of individual acquirers and payment method providers in different markets, and finding a way to view its entire payment ecosystem’s performance at one time so it could “execute optimal payment combinations” to yield the best financial results.

“CellPoint Digital has enabled us to transform our business,” said Yasin Demir, Virgin Atlantic’s head of distribution and payments. “Now that we have been able to use multiple acquirers at one time, we have been able to diversify our risk, reduce cost, and optimize our payments strategy.”

PYMNTS examined the airline industry’s embrace of payment orchestration last year in an interview with Kristian Gjerding, CEO of CellPoint Digital.

An airline ecosystem, he said, can have dozens of stakeholders across various departments, as well as enterprise merchants looking for ways to address the changing needs of individual and business travelers.

Payments orchestration “offers ways to see a combination of increased conversions, decreased costs and efficiency gains on the back office side, and speed to market,” he told PYMNTS. Gjerding added that his company also automates and simplifies the back office, freeing some resources for customers to apply to other parts of the business.