What is the Open Payment Alliance?

Vision

Build an industry-specific B2B community based payment channel which features streamlined execution of complex B2B payment flows, payment method independence, seamless access to Level-3 data, out of the box compliance with present and future standards and regulatory requirements, and plug and play connectivity between the information systems of all industry stakeholders.

Mission Statement

Travel companies will be able to send payments instructions to the "Payment Manager" specifying the terms on which payment for a given transaction should be executed and it will be the Payment Manager's responsibility to leverage the network of partners of the OPA in order to guarantee that the money seamlessly flows into the intended recipient's bank account according to the specified payment terms.

Group Objectives

The goal of the OPA is to act as a catalyst in the transition from the highly inefficient manner that B2B payments are handled today to a fully streamlined payment infrastructure. The goal of the OPA initiative is to attack the root of the problem of B2B payments mirroring the way disruptive innovation is happening at exponential speed across different industries worldwide: leveraging vast networks of relatively small companies which specialize in specific pieces of a complex value chain and then bundle their services into alliances to collectively disrupt entire industries.

Benefits Overview

Hotels

• Freedom of choice. Hotel negotiates for their preferred form and conditions of payment based on their contractual relationship and rate types (pre-paid, etc.) with each OTA or agency or other distribution channel
• Streamlined Front desk operations. The front desk only worries about charging incidentals to guests. They know that the payment will be received from the distributor without any manual effort regardless of the form of payment used by the distributor. If an invoice is required, it will be issued automatically through the PMS

Travel Companies

• Competitive Advantage. Contracting team can offer hotels their preferred FOP and focus on negotiations of other contract items
• IT Bandwidth. Through OPA interfaces, seamlessly access a suite of payment partners which cater to all payment related needs (multiple FOPs, eBilling/Bill-back, Forex, etc) without having to integrate each of them independently
• Operational Efficiency. Administrative effort and costs derived from payment inefficiencies (reconciliation, forced transactions, chargebacks, supplier bank account maintenance, etc.) is greatly mitigated

Consumer

• Transparency. The B2B payment process is totally transparent to the end customer. The customer journey will never be impacted by the established payment procedures between travel companies and hotels