More than a year after its acquisition of Conferma, Sabre reports deeper partnerships and improvement in hotel virtual card acceptance, while Conferma reports staff growth and additional technology investment.
Already a longtime partner to Sabre prior to the acquisition, Conferma acts as "the product experts" in the Sabre Virtual Payments business, which works with travel management companies and other agencies to build end-to-end payment strategies, Patricio Boccardo, the division's chief of commercial, said. The end goal is for TMCs to be able to turn payments from a cost center to a revenue center via rebates that can offset or go beyond the cost of the technology, he said.
"We map out everything they need to pay, how they need to pay and what type of payment setup they have, and we optimize that," Boccardo said. "We tell them in order to increase your revenues, and in order to give a better service, you need this type of technology, these banking partners and these suppliers."
With Conferma, Sabre "has access to the entire ecosystem," included connected issuers—of which Sabre has upgraded just under a dozen to "premium partners" in which Sabre "can operate on their behalf and offer through the travel ecosystem their own products through the platform," according to Boccardo. Mastercard, which last year took a minority stake in Conferma as part of a partnership with it and Sabre to build new capabilities for virtual cards, is helping to broaden that access to banks and issuers, he said.
As it builds those connections, however, Sabre has no intention of fully merging Conferma into an exclusive partner, Boccardo said. It will continue to be "completely agnostic" as a subsidiary of Sabre, he said.
"They power Cytric from Amadeus, and they power other technologies and other players," he said. "We'll benefit from their technology to build out our strategies."
Similarly, Sabre continues to work with Visa, though the Mastercard partnership has helped accelerate expansion, Boccardo said.
For Conferma's part, it is undergoing "investment in technology, people and components" chief operations officer David Wood said. That has included a 25 percent in headcount this year, with plans to add 50 or 60 more people to the organization over the next eight or nine months, he said.
Conferma has been working with Sabre's hotel division as well to help boost the acceptance of virtual payments, including training for hotels, Boccardo said. Conferma for the past few years has been working to automate the process for hotels, with the reliance on fax machines for the process significantly cut down, according to the company.
Boccardo said Europe, the Middle East and Africa remains "the more mature region" for virtual payments. Both North America and the Asia-Pacific region are accelerating, though the slower travel recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic in Asia-Pacific has slowed down that growth as well. Latin America is a more challenging market, because "it's not a region; it's a lot of mini-regions," he said.
"The only way to service those markets is not with global products but local arrangements with local entities," Boccardo said. "We are willing to expand that market and are working on it, but in terms of priorities of markets, EMEA is the bigger one, and North America is something we are accelerating."
While virtual card use has focused largely around hotels, Boccardo said use with airlines is another growth area, although the penetration rate remains very small compared with hotels. It's actually a simpler process than with hotels in terms of acceptance, because "you pay the supplier, and that's the end of the process," he said.