Sabre acquires Conferma Pay | Business Travel News Europe

Sabre has acquired funds firm Conferma Pay, BTN Europe has realized. The acquisition occurred on 3 August, Sabre later confirmed.

In a letter from Conferma Pay interim CEO and former Sabre EMEA senior vp Martin Cowley seen by BTN Europe, he says that funds within the trade are “within the midst of a revolution”. 

He continues: “Having partnered for a few years, each Sabre and Conferma Pay acknowledge the altering panorama and the necessity for vital expertise funding within the B2B fee house. That is why Sabre shall be buying Conferma Pay to assist it advance digital card funds in journey and lay the foundations to develop applied sciences that allow the long run B2B journey funds.” 

“By combining the journey trade experience of Sabre and the fee experience of Conferma Pay, we consider we will proceed to supply a powerful worth proposition for journey companies.” 

Cowley added: “This acquisition will allow Conferma Pay to evolve the abilities and applied sciences of each organisations to develop enhanced fee options, which tackle gaps and broaden alternatives for optimised gross sales within the B2B journey house.” 

A Sabre spokesperson stated: “On 3 August 2022, Sabre acquired UK fintech firm Conferma Pay. Sabre has had a profitable partnership with Conferma Pay for a few years, and Conferma Pay is the idea upon which its Sabre Digital Funds proposition is constructed.  

“We consider we are actually well-positioned to broaden on that proposition with Conferma Pay turning into a Sabre-owned entity.”

One TMC boss, who didn’t want to be named, stated: “Conferma is the funds glue for many TMCs. They guarantee we will pay securely and likewise collect the wealthy knowledge we have to reconcile funds. With out them, we’d actually must double the scale of our finance workforce and massively scale back agent productiveness.” 

Conferma was based in 2005 by Simon and Jim Barker and immediately connects issuers to greater than 700 journey administration firms, all the key world distribution programs and over 100 on-line reserving instruments 

It began working with Sabre in 2011 when it launched Digital Funds for Resort Settlement after which moved to a full integration, together with air bookings, in late 2016. 

In 2020, Conferma inked a take care of Visa to make the fee large’s playing cards obtainable in travellers’ cellular wallets and launched a corporate virtual payments platform whereas in 2021, it signed a reseller agreement with the GlobalStar TMC network.

Earlier this yr, Conferma introduced a tie-up with Thrust Carbon to launch a carbon reporting system that measures the environmental affect of enterprise journeys primarily based on fee knowledge from digital playing cards.