Cebu Pacific extends its partnership with CellPoint Digital

By Leandra Monteiro

CellPoint Digital, a FinTech leader in payment orchestration, announced the next leg of its partnership with Cebu Pacific, the largest airline in the Philippines.

Following the successful implementation of CellPoint Digital’s Payment Orchestration Platform, Velocity, across all of Cebu Pacific’s digital channels last year, the airline has now implemented new alternative payment methods to provide more flexible options to their customer’s payment experience. Thanks to the PSP/acquirer agnostic Velocity platform, Cebu Pacific customers will now have access to the following popular payment methods: GCash, GrabPay and PayMaya.

The new alternative payment methods boast wide-ranging end-user benefits, including enabling split payments between travel fund vouchers and cash, and converting local currencies in real-time. For the airline itself, providing more payment methods should increase revenues, and by optimising card payment processing across multiple acquirers, they will be able to do real-time transaction monitoring – by market, and by payment method – all delivered conveniently in one place.

The intelligent routing module already dynamically optimises the routing of each transaction made via a bespoke network of acquiring banks, thereby maximising acceptance rates and lowering transaction costs.

Candice Iyog, Vice-president for Marketing and Customer Experience at Cebu Pacific said, “Our partnership with CellPoint Digital continues to go from strength to strength. As the world begins to open back up and consumers are more used to using flexible digital payment methods than ever before, we’re proud to be able to offer our customers a frictionless customer experience at checkout by giving them the payment methods they most want to use.”

Commenting on the announcement Kristian Gjerding, CEO of CellPoint Digital shared, “We’re delighted to announce this evolution in our partnership with Cebu Pacific. Airlines have, by necessity, some of the most complex payment ecosystems of modern merchants, and an equally diverse customer base to match. By utilising our comprehensive payment orchestration platform and having access to a large payments ecosystem, we have simplified the payment process for Cebu while bolstering its offering with popular alternative payment methods for its customers.”

The news comes as the APAC airline sector gears up to take off again following the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, with 77% of APAC airline customers ready to travel as soon as restrictions fully ease. Via its access to CellPoint Digital’s growing ecosystem, Cebu Pacific is ready to maximise the payments journey for APAC travellers with payment methods covering over 40 local and global cards, and over 350 alternative payment methods.