Wakanow selects Outpayce B2B Wallet for virtual payments

By Gloria Methri

Wakanow.com, one of Africa’s largest travel sellers, will now use virtual cards to make payments to suppliers like airlines and hotels through Outpayce’s B2B Wallet.

The adoption of the digital wallet means a suitable virtual card is automatically generated to pay for each transaction, based on factors like currency, provider acceptance policies and Wakanow’s own payments strategy.

With this orchestration capability, Wakanow Group can enhance the optimization of outbound payments whilst gaining a global supplier pay-out capability that reduces the risk of fraud and simplifies the payment process.

Bayo Adedeji, Group CEO, Wakanow, said, “Payments are an integral part of our strategy, as coordinated by our subsidiary FinTech company, Kalabash54.com. With this technology, we can access a wide range of payment methods in any currency we need, so we can pay suppliers quickly and easily using virtual cards. We don’t need to spend time reconciling payments to bookings and suppliers don’t need to wait 30 days to receive payment. How travel companies pay one another has been slow and complex but virtual cards bring the industry into the digital age.”

Claudio Santos, Head of Commercial, Travel Sellers, Outpayce, added, “Savvy travel sellers are embracing virtual payments to digitalize B2B pay-outs whilst generating incremental revenue and reducing manual reconciliation. Having the right insight, data, and algorithm is crucial to ensuring the best payment method is matched to each transaction, and that can help our travel seller customers increase virtual card acceptance by 30%.”

Virtual cards are single-use card numbers explicitly generated for individual payments. This one-to-one relationship means travel companies no longer need to reconcile a long list of payments to an equally long list of bookings at the end of each month.

In addition, the widely accepted payment method is resistant to fraud as the card number can only be used with a specified merchant for a specified amount. When making payments with virtual cards, certain issuers also offer rebates, which can add an important source of incremental revenue for travel sellers.

Outpayce B2B Wallet offers pre-paid, debit and credit cards from a wide range of issuers, covering 46 different currencies.