IATA leverages CPI to transform payment transparency for the global aviation industry
The challenge
One of the greatest challenges for the airline industry is lack of payment transparency and certainty. Many payments made to IATA members are cross border. Frequently, users would have their account debited but be unclear when the payment had reached the beneficiary.
As a result, members had to call or email the relevant bank, which was a complicated and time-consuming process. On other occasions, correspondent banks that were part of the payment chain might deduct fees from transactions, meaning the beneficiary would receive less than the intended amount. There was no easy way of understanding or identifying the banks that had deducted such fees or even establishing the amount received by the beneficiary.
Exception handling and investigations into delayed or other problematic payments were manual, time-consuming (often taking several days to resolve) and cumbersome for all involved – ultimately, they increased costs. These problems risked damaging airlines’ relationships with their travel partners.
The solution
IATA wanted to address these challenges and decided to become a pilot client for Citi Payment Insights (CPI), a new service providing institutional clients with real-time payments visibility, and the ability to action payments on-demand via CitiDirect BE. IATA also intends to use CPI with ISO XML files via its host-to-host connectivity in the future.
Using a unique identifying reference number, CPI empowers clients by providing a complete view of the transaction lifecycle within Citi’s global network, and across the correspondent banking ecosystem by integrating the transparency provided by SWIFT’s gpi initiative.
CPI’s enhanced visibility is available in 70 markets and includes processing status, processing timelines, charges deducted across correspondent banks, and the amount credited to the beneficiary.
