From Amadeus Payments to Outpayce from Amadeus: Our growth story

When launching a new company, branding exercises are often dismissed as nothing more than a new logo, a tweak to the colour palette or a new mission statement. Outpayce from Amadeus– our standalone payments brand launched at the start of the year – is much more than that.

When I joined the Amadeus Payments team in 2022, the business already had a strong presence and awareness with our airline and travel seller customers. Payments had become an important component of Amadeus’ diversification strategy. The unit had grown sufficiently to have its own profit and loss account, a team in the hundreds and an impressive list of customers, prospects, and partners.

But we knew that there was even more potential to grow our payments profile. Top of my to-do list when joining payments was to put everything in place so that we could apply for an e-Money license.The license is key – it will allow us to expand what we can offer to existing clients and also open up new opportunities for airlines, travel sellers and for Amadeus. If we were to look specifically at the card issuing capability, it means we can deliver more choice and a smoother overall experience to customers, particularly those using our Outpayce B2B Wallet solution to pay-out.

Our application for an e-Money license is via the Spanish regulators. This means that, with a successful application, Outpayce will be able to provide regulated payments services in Spain, and subsequently across the European Economic Area thanks to the passporting system.

As part of the broader evolution strategy, we created a wholly-owned Amadeus company dedicated to payments. We opted for the name Outpayce from Amadeus for a number of reasons. Most importantly, we needed it to resonate with the market, and we’re pleased with what we hope Outpayce signifies. We ensured the word “pay” features in the brand so there is a direct link with what we do. The name is forward-thinking also, it implies that we want to help our customers to be ahead of the pack in the fast-moving world of fintech.

The “from Amadeus” addition anchors Outpayce to its parent company in the minds of the industry whilst articulating the close links we will continue to build with almost every part of the company and the Amadeus solutions. Our mission at Outpayce is to deliver a smooth payment experience at every stage of the traveler’s journey, and it’s only through close integration to Amadeus’ airline, travel seller, airport, and hospitality technology that we can deliver on that commitment.

Our journey in travel payments

For all of the above to fall into place, understanding the background to Outpayce is important. Amadeus got into payments to meet a genuine unmet customer need about ten years ago. A lot of our customers were telling us that there was demand for payment capabilities as part of our airline IT portfolio.So, we developed our gateway services that convey technical payments messages between our airline customers and key players in the payments chain, like acquiring banks. Since then, we’ve built an entire merchant services portfolio, helping every type of travel provider to accept and manage payments. In parallel, we developed our B2B Wallet solution in 2016, which helps travel agencies pay out using virtual cards to better settle billions of Euros in travel spend.

Amadeus has always developed products to anticipate or respond to the needs of the industry, and that’s another reason for Outpayce. Airlines and travel sellers are aware that travelers want to pay in modern ways, without friction. Buy Now Pay Later,alternative payment methods and multi-currency pricing​ are all good examples of this. Our customers need someone to do the heavy lifting, to provide everything needed for them to be able to offer these options to their travelers in a smooth, secure and cost-efficient way. Our license application will give them confidence that we are committed to payments for the long-term and, with the license, we would have the regulatory go-ahead to improve the service we offer.

You might be wondering what this looks like on our roadmap. To bring this to life, I’d like to share a couple of examples.

Firstly, through the e-Money license, Outpayce will be able to issue pre-paid virtual cards. We see opportunities to place virtual cards from Outpayce and our range of issuing partners into the Cytric self-booking tool and directly into the secure enclave on a business traveler’s mobile phone.

This payments innovation could mean the end of the traditional expense report because every element of the trip will be paid-for from the corporation’s centralized payments account, according to preestablished expense policy, in a very visible and easily controlled manner. It’s a game changer for business travelers and their companies.

As a second example, through the eMoney license and new Open Banking capabilities, we would be able to offer our customers the possibility to view all their payments accounts in a single portal embedded into our Outpayce products. A bit like a consumer seeing all their accounts in a single screen, this simplifies accounting, the management of payment services and helps with decision making.

Looking to the future

Payments has fast become a strategic differentiator for our customers. In the highly competitive world of travel retailing experiences, no brand can afford to offer a poor payment experience.

That’s why Outpayce is methodically examining how payments happen across every step of the traveler journey, from making a booking to arriving at the airport, at the hotel and every digital interaction in-between.

When booking a plane ticket and providing payment details to an OTA or an airline, how can we facilitate payments at other touch points? Can that information be passed along the traveler journey to allow for invisible payments? It sounds like such a simple enhancement but it doesn’t happen today. There are hundreds of pain points travelers regularly face.

At Outpayce, we’re identifying those pain points and doing one of two things. Where it makes sense, we’re building our own solutions to those problems. Where it’s quicker or other synergies exist, we’re continuing to build our partner network and connecting them to our payments platform, so our customers can access their expertise. In every case, we always keep the complete end-to-end journey in mind with payments technology that is very tightly integrated to the applications and technology travelers use.

We’re looking for travel payments to be easy, in turn, making the end-to-end travel experience smoother and more enjoyable for the traveler. Our goal is for travel to be simply paid.