The challenge

Given the nature of travel, where bookings are usually made in advance and settlement to hotels is made upon completion of travel, the company is open to the risk of FX rate fluctuations when it comes to settling with overseas hotels. It also faces multiple recurring cross-border payments to hotels leading to high fund transfer fees as well as manual processing.

tiket.com looked to its banking partner to streamline its payment processes, FX risk management processes, automated FX execution and settlement to offshore hotels and partners. The company collects IDR proceeds from customers who purchase airline tickets and make hotel bookings, and regularly makes foreign currency payments to airlines, hotels and partners overseas.

The solution

Deutsche Bank delivered an integrated payment and FX workflow solution which enables tiket.com to automatically book its FX trades. This will help tiket.com to reduce the FX risk incurred in holding mismatched inflow and outflow currency until the payment date. Afterwards, the workflow also captures supporting documentation as required by local regulations, to settle the FX transactions into tiket.com’s accounts with the bank, without the need for additional confirmation.

Best practice and innovation

tiket.com and its bank were able to show thought-leadership and solution capability to tackle the inefficiencies the company was facing. Through an automated workflow, the bank was able to help tiket.com eliminate any manual work and processes around the calculation and booking of FX and settlement of FX transactions into their clients’ accounts without additional confirmation.

The bank’s ability to provide a straight through, end-to-end process – including the simplification of payment process preparation – is superior to tiket.com’s current process.

Within a short timeframe, tiket.com has already started experiencing the benefits of this automated solution and has been actively discussing with its bank to expand the services to other vendors/partners such as airlines. Furthermore, this solution proves to be replicable across other clients within the OTA industry and across the other APAC markets.

tiket.com is able to benefit from this automated cutting-edge solution to process timely payments to vendors, ultimately boosting the vendors’ satisfaction and strengthening existing and future relationships.

Key benefits

• Cost savings.

• Process efficiencies.

• Increased automation.

• Errors reduced.

• Manual intervention reduced.

“This integrated payment and workflow solution helps streamlining our international payments process. At the same time, it also helps us in managing FX risk automatically. The structure is flexible enough for us to explore further deployment in other use cases.”

Eddy Putra, Head of Treasury