The travel industry and payments: moving forward together in 2022
The travel industry is on a challenging and unpredictable journey, after the toughest 18 months in its history. As travel becomes both more viable and attractive again, tapping into the latest wave of fintech innovation is an opportunity to boost profits, streamline operations, and gain a competitive edge.
Background: open banking services
Open banking came into effect in 2018, as part of an EU & UK initiative to modernise payment infrastructure and boost competition in financial services.
The initiative enabled a new bank-based payment method in the UK, allowing certain FCA-regulated fintechs to move money instantly between customer and business accounts.
These organisations are often regulated to read and share consumers’ bank account information, with the direct permission of the account holder.
Citizen is a regulated payments service, with a focus on providing a high-quality bank-based payment channel for forward-thinking businesses of all kinds.
Our platform, PayBlox, makes it easy for companies with basic technical capabilities to start benefitting from the speed, security, and low fees of bank-based payments. We’re also regulated as an Account Information Service, allowing us to provide several truly unique features, detailed below.
Citizen’s PayBlox platform: problems we solve
Businesses facing similar challenges to you, in sectors as diverse as trading, fundraising, gaming and utilities, are using PayBlox to:
- Improve payment completion rates
- Reduce payment processing costs
- Make instant refunds to known customers
- Improving operational efficiency and reconciliation
- Prevent fraud
- Manage and mitigate chargebacks
Payments via Citizen are unlike anything you’ve seen before. You can try one out for yourself by clicking here.
Preventing fraud and combating illegitimate chargebacks
The simplicity of a Citizen payment is guaranteed by the lack of payment cards, as is a higher level of security. Bank-based payment methods like Citizen rely on confirmation via your customer’s banking app, removing the security vulnerabilities of passwords or card numbers.
This authentication technique also arms you against false chargeback claims, as you know your customer had to approve the payment within their banking apps.
In addition to raising the bar for security, Citizen payments are designed to make it easier than ever for your customers to pay you — as they require no cards, codes, or typing — just a few quick taps on their mobile device.
Payments that convert
Getting customer journeys right is critical. Quick, intuitive and attractive payment experiences lead to improved payment completion, or conversion, rates. Bank-based payment methods have the potential to offer payment journeys of unprecedented simplicity, and Citizen delivers on this, as you’ll know if you try the demo!
In addition to giving your customers a more elegant, simpler payment experience, we’ve built several intuitive tools into our PayBlox platform to make it easier to accept, reconcile and refund payments.
- PayBlox lets you implement quick bank-account verification checks to transact with named customers
- This makes it simpler for you to attribute payments to named customers, streamlining your support, reconciliation and refund processes
- Refunds are better via PayBlox. Not only are they easier as you can pay out directly to named account-holders — they cost you less, and settle to your customer’s account instantly
It’s worth emphasising that payments via Citizen are highly cost-effective. Bank-based payments are cheaper than most formats because only one intermediary (us) is involved in making the transfer of funds.
Ready to give your customers a better way to pay?
If you think you’re ready to modernise your payment processes, or just want to ask us a question, we’ll be more than happy to help you out.
You can talk to us via the live chat on our homepage, or drop us a message whenever you like via the form on this page.
