Founded in 2005, Agoda is one of the world’s leading online travel booking platforms with a global network of over 4.5 million hotels and properties worldwide. Travellers can also book flights and various activities on Agoda.com and the Agoda mobile app. Headquartered in Singapore, Agoda is part of Booking Holdings Inc.
Agoda has been partnering with Ant since 2014. From initially leveraging Ant’s platform to let Agoda’s customers pay seamlessly using their Alipay wallets, the partnership has expanded to global payments across the markets Agoda is in. Now, with our Antom unified merchant payment platform, we are constantly looking at how we can create better business impact and make travel more delightful.
Besides working with Antom on optimising payments performance across all payment methods, Agoda is also tapping into Antom’s capabilities beyond payments – including our fund management solution, AI risk management and AI marketing solution, A+ Rewards.
Hear from Jibran Bugvi, Head of Fintech, Agoda and Agnes Chua, Head of Southeast Asia, Global Strategic Accounts, Antom, Ant International in our conversation with Merchant Advisory Group’s International VP, Paul Tunstall.
Watch the video to learn more about the Agoda and Antom partnership, our views on AI, travel payments, global interoperability and more.
Jibran:
We try and embed payments into the booking flow to provide as seamless and frictionless an experience as possible. That's our differentiator. In essence, we want to make payments intuitive, invisible, and hyperlocal.
Paul:
My name is Paul Tunstall. I'm the Vice President of International for the Merchant Advisory Group (MAG). We're a non-profit trade association which gives a voice to the merchants by driving innovation, collaboration and advocacy across the industry. We're joined by Jibran, Head of FinTech for Agoda and also Agnes, who is Head of Southeast Asia, Global Strategic Accounts, Antom, Ant International.
So Agoda is a travel platform which has a global network of over 4.5 million hotels and properties worldwide, which also includes flights and other activities that you can book as well as a traveller. Agoda and Ant have been partners since 2014, initially allowing Agoda consumers to use their Alipay wallet, that's now leveraged a little bit more with regards to additional payment methods and obviously enhancing the relationship between the two organisations.
It's also about financial solutions and marketing campaigns. These like-minded partners are constantly looking for ways of making travel more seamless, secure and enjoyable, whether that's leveraging tech or cross-industry practices and so forth.
The complexities within the travel vertical, is a lot more than other verticals. You've got cross-border, you've got the language barriers, you've got the regulation. From a merchant perspective as well, those payment landscapes, those challenges, the fraud risks, as well as the evolving consumer behaviours. So, Jibran, how is Agoda working with Antom to create that seamless payment experience?
Jibran:
Sure, great question, Paul. Great to be in Singapore. So, as you noted in the introduction, Agoda is a digital travel platform. And so, if you think about it, online travel is a very commoditised space. The same hotel room that you book on Agoda, you can book on several other platforms. You can find that hotel on Google. You can actually physically walk into that hotel and get the exact same product. So, it's a very commoditised business.
And so, what platforms like us do to differentiate ourselves is we provide an unparalleled customer experience. And we try and do that by offering local payment methods, by offering local language support, by offering localised deals. Now, from a payments perspective, our aim is to do three things. We want to offer the best coverage of local payment methods of any online platform. We have a hundred plus payment methods and we think we stack up pretty well. We try and aim for best in industry authentication rates and we try and embed payments into the booking flow to provide as seamless and frictionless an experience as possible. In essence, we want to make payments intuitive, invisible and hyperlocal.
Agnes:
The Antom and Agoda partnership, basically, is very much a reflection of the evolvement of consumer expectations. As you rightly put it, localisation is very important. The whole Southeast Asian market is, and that is why we have been building all these local payment methods in the past ten or so years. Travel is also a vertical that experiences higher fraud rate. Payment authentication is very important and you have to have more stringent parameters to authenticate the payments to safeguard our merchants. And our fraud monitoring tool help our merchants prevent fraud, sending out alerts, and remove all these potential fraudulent transactions totally on behalf of merchants.
Paul:
If we think about the unique needs of travellers in emerging markets, what innovations do you believe will make cross-border payments truly seamless?
Jibran:
Emerging markets is a very, very exciting place to be if you're a payments professional, right? So if you think about it, the emerging market traveller has very successfully transcended the typical evolution of a payments journey. And they have gone from traditional financial payment methods, skipped cards, and gone straight to mobile-first alternative payments.
What that means is that the emerging market traveller requires a kaleidoscope of payment methods across QR code, across Buy Now, Pay Later, e-wallets and you even have to service the emerging market customer that wants to walk into a convenience store and make a cash payment for an online booking.
As an online platform in emerging markets, you need to offer tremendous payment breadth, coverage of payment methods. At the same time, you need to stay on top of real-time payment trends. You need to stay on top of account-to-account transfers, wallet-to-wallet transfers, and essentially, you need to allow payments to be instant, borderless. It should be the same experience whether you're looking from Bangkok or Bogotá.
Agnes:
Yeah, fully agree with you. For emerging markets, diversity of payments is really important. So that is why we spend so much time building up all the local payment methods, your over-the-counter, you mentioned, and then the local wallets acceptance. And then you have your virtual accounts, bank transfers and all that. So, I think it's important to offer a diversity of all these payment methods in the emerging markets. Governments are also working closely with one another to enable real-time payment cross-border as well. So, with this effort, it means that a Singaporean can now make a payment seamlessly in Thailand, a Filipino can actually use their GCash wallet in Malaysia, for example.
Paul:
I want to touch on AI. It's such a hot topic in our daily lives currently. Both Agoda and Antom are tech companies. First of all, Jibran, what are your views on AI? How is Agoda using that to improve, not only the travel, but also the business impact as well?
Jibran:
AI is, I think, incredibly transformative for the tech sector. My personal opinion is AI is going to have three major impacts. We are a tech company. So, I think the fundamental first impact is going to be how we do coding.
I read somewhere that today about 25% of global code is written through AI, and it's going to cross 50% in a couple of years. And that's a trend that we see as well. What that does is it allows us to do a lot more in less time with the resources that we have. And that has benefits in terms of the go-to-market timelines that we have for new products. It augments our velocity, and essentially, it supercharges our productivity. I think the other two would be in terms of customer service. So, AI is able to help us provide more personalised experience, a more personalised end-to-end support for customers that reach out to us.
I think in the medium term, AI has the potential to do a lot for payment tech, so across the fraud defence that we do, recommending payment methods. Over time, I think AI is going to help make payments for cross-border travel a lot more seamless.
Paul:
So, Agnes, what about AI in Antom's platform? How do you ensure what you're delivering for Agoda’s customers has been delivered to the travel industry as a whole?
Agnes:
Tech and AI are a very big focus of ours at Antom. It's very much part of our DNA. So, we have launched our Antom AI Copilot. So, basically this is a B2B application for our merchants to be able to seamlessly implement, orchestrate, and also optimise the payment channels that we have end-to-end. So, think of it like GPT for your API, your settlement, etc. This helps to accelerate the timeline for a merchant to come on board, to enable the payment channels, and also to cut down from the response in days, usually dealing with human merchant tech support team to near real-time response immediately with our AI agent. This basically elevates the experience for our merchants. It's a game changer in our merchant tech support space.
Agoda and Antom, we didn't jump onto the AI bandwagon just because it's trending. But because we're leveraging on tech to actually help us create better travel and business impact.
Besides Antom Copilot, we also have A+ Rewards, which you have been using. so basically, our AI digital marketing solution is effective in driving user acquisition and also drive engagement rates for your consumers to convert that into payment to you.
And then Antom Shield, which is our AI risk solution which you mentioned that, that is also an important part of your business. This solution basically helps use AI to help you block fraud and also to study the pattern to prevent future occurrences. We also have another product called the Antom Payment Orchestration. And this is basically a routing solution, AI-driven. This helps merchants to find the best cost-effective way of accepting payments.
Paul:
Fast forward five years, what does the ideal travel payment experience look like? What do you think needs to happen to make the vision a reality?
Agnes:
So ongoing payment tech will actually help make payment more seamless and secure. And that's through, you know, interoperability, cross-border payment tech that will make it easy for payments to be done cross-border and tokenisation of cards, using facial recognition, or voice recognition and all that.
This will help to make transaction more secure as well. So, all these, ongoing will have to be part of it to make this happen. And in five years’ time, connectivity will be a common thing on all flights. So basically, that means you can still do your shopping online, on your mobile, or through your flight entertainment systems, in five years’ time, judging from how we are going now.
Jibran:
To look to the future, I take inspiration from the past. So, if you look at the journey of embedded finance and embedded payments, one of the seminal moments was when the ride hailing companies start embedding payments within the booking flow.
And it coined the phrase ,“payment should be as simple as closing the door of your Uber.” You book a car, you complete the ride, close the door and payment is done. Now, in five years, that's where I would like travel payments to be where it should be as simple as tapping your hotel key card or snapping on your seatbelt before takeoff.
You shouldn't have to think about it. It should be seamless, organic, intuitive.
Paul:
Just to add from a merchant’s perspective, right, they want to have that great travel experience for the consumers, but it comes with real-world complexities. The areas that a merchant has to manage, is things like higher cross-border fees.
You've got the chargeback risks. You've got the fraud. And it's all while managing that is also managing the expectations of the consumer experience, which is continually rising from a merchant's perspective.
When I think about that, and the emerging payment innovations, are you betting on that's going to drive that big leap in travel payments going forward?
Jibran:
We're obviously excited about tokenised payments, the security apparatus that it brings, the product possibilities that it creates.
Virtual cards have pretty much revolutionised B2B travel payments. But I think the next big leg is really going to be solving for in-destination travel spend. If you think about it, when you book your flight, your hotel, your ground transportation, your activity, you're able to pay an online provider like us through payment methods of your choice.
But when you go in-destination into 190+ countries around the world, that is where you still have friction. Now, as payment professionals, we have that idealistic scenario of my payment method works everywhere, but that's not reality, right? And sometimes the FX is a killer.
Agnes:
O2O, online-to-offline, it will be that, that will drive things forward. So basically, besides seamless cross-border payment and all, technology like QR, NFC on both cards and wallets, on softPOS, in-person payment, all this, you know, and biometrics, tokenisation, are expected to play a very large part in the travel sector.
So, in-flight payment, like I mentioned earlier, now enables you to buy your duty-free, your shopping, or maybe if they have not booked the hotel as yet, they can actually do it in-flight.
And all of this is where softPOS will come in, consumers will be able to tap and pay on the device itself, either on their mobile or on the in-flight entertainment system.
I think it's interesting that we don't talk about AI as in something that's in the future, but AI should already be part of our companies’ strategy to become more efficient and that can turn and drive into bigger impact for our consumers.
Paul:
I'm going to move on to disruptive forces, whether it be technological, regulatory or behavioural. What do you see having the greatest impact on travel or travel payments? And how are you positioning to navigate those?
Jibran:
So, I think the forces you mentioned are the ones that we need to watch out for. So, regulation is key. We're talking cross-border global travel. There's a lot of regulatory trends to watch out for. PSD2, PSD3, open banking, data privacy. The fact is it's a very fragmented regulatory market in the emerging markets.
I think the other major trend is technology. So, with AI, with blockchain, etc., it's really reducing the barriers to innovation. And then finally, the emerging market traveller has evolving behaviour. There is breadth of payment methods as we discussed, but also, they're getting more savvy about what they want. They're getting more savvy about the FX rates that they’re charged. And they want a travel experience, which is as simple as closing the door of their Uber. So, we really need to do something about making the travel experience as smooth as tapping that hotel key card.
Agnes:
Travel has always been a very resilient, adaptable and agile industry. Innovation, collaboration within industry, these are important as well as international regulatory framework that exists to actually help this industry to facilitate better cross-border and linkage and also to make it easier for them to travel.
Environment factors may also prompt regulatory behaviour and tech change, like hotel and airlines, now that they want more flexible payment methods, for example, payment link, for example, you know, softPOS to be able to do a tap-and-pay in-person payment.
That being said, travel merchants have always been at the forefront of changes and the way to counter this is to deal with these changes more quickly and more securely. Even if there're any challenges, we'll weather it together.
Paul:
Cross-border has definitely come up multiple times today as well as emerging markets. But I think there's certainly an exciting view for the future of how technology will evolve, whether it's AI, whether it's other innovations to help bring along the customer journey and help merchants like Agoda and service providers like Antom.
Thank you for joining us today.
And here's to exploring more destinations and payment innovations. And I look forward to how Agoda and Antom will shape the future of payments.