Sabre Acquires Conferma Pay | Business Travel News

Sabre has acquired payments company
Conferma Pay, BTN Europe has learned. The acquisition took place on 3
August, Sabre later confirmed.

In a letter from Conferma Pay
interim CEO and former Sabre EMEA senior vice president Martin Cowley seen by
BTN Europe, he says that payments in the industry are “in the midst of a
revolution”.

He continues: “Having partnered for
many years, both Sabre and Conferma Pay acknowledge the changing landscape and
the need for significant technology investment in the B2B payment space. This
is why Sabre will be acquiring Conferma Pay to help it advance virtual card
payments in travel and lay the foundations to develop technologies that enable
the future B2B travel payments.”

“By combining the travel industry
expertise of Sabre and the payment expertise of Conferma Pay, we believe we can
continue to offer a strong value proposition for travel agencies.”

Cowley added: “This acquisition will
enable Conferma Pay to evolve the skills and technologies of both organizations
to develop enhanced payment solutions, which address gaps and expand
opportunities for optimized sales in the B2B travel space.”

A Sabre spokesperson said: “On 3 August
2022, Sabre acquired UK fintech company Conferma Pay. Sabre has had a
successful partnership with Conferma Pay for many years, and Conferma Pay is
the basis upon which its Sabre Virtual Payments proposition is
built.

“We believe we are now well-positioned
to expand on that proposition with Conferma Pay becoming a Sabre-owned entity.”

One TMC boss, who did not wish to be
named, said: “Conferma is the payments glue for most TMCs. They ensure we can
pay securely and also gather the rich data we need to reconcile payments.
Without them, we’d literally need to double the size of our finance team and
massively reduce agent productivity.”

Conferma was founded in 2005 by
Simon and Jim Barker and today connects issuers to more than 700 travel
management companies, all the major global distribution systems and over 100
online booking tools

It started working with Sabre in
2011 when it introduced Virtual Payments for Hotel Settlement and then moved to
a full integration, including air bookings, in late 2016.

In 2020, Conferma inked a deal with
Visa to make the payment giant’s cards available in travellers’ mobile wallets
and launched
a corporate virtual payments platform while in 2021, it signed a reseller agreement with the GlobalStar TMC
network.

Earlier this year, Conferma
announced a partnership with Thrust Carbon to launch a carbon reporting
system that measures the environmental impact of business trips
based on payment data from virtual cards.