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Take off without any surprises landing in your post-holiday bills

When travelling outside of the EU for many Irish tourists it is far too easy to tap or key in pin numbers without giving too much thought to currency charges incurred until you check the bottom line of your bank balance

Robbie Doherty, director of product and scheme compliance with AIB Merchant Services and Blánaid Zanini, general manager Europe for Fexco Payments & FX.

Fri Sep 8 2023 - 05:00

We’ve all been there. You come back from holidays with a sunny glow that immediately pales when you realise how much money you’ve spent. A partnership between fintech firms AIB Merchant Services and Fexco, in collaboration with IAG-owned low-cost airline Vueling, welcomes a new approach.

Now budget conscious holidaymakers travelling with Vueling, have complete transparency over their transactions in their home currency, thanks to technology provided by AIB Merchant Services and Fexco. The dynamic currency conversion (DCC) solution, which is 100 per cent Irish-made offers customers, who use both the Vueling smartphone app and website, the option of having prices displayed and making payments in their home currency.

Customers who spend time reviewing bank and credit card statements following a vacation outside the euro zone and are taken aback by the currency charges paid will appreciate what a benefit this is.

The innovative DCC technology provided to Vueling customers allows them the opportunity to book flights with the airline and to have, in real-time, the exact cost of every step of every journey in the currency of their choice. This means they know how much they are spending and on what. It allows them to make informed decisions as to whether they should book the flights on their preferred dates — do they represent the best value or should they look at different dates instead, for example?

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“People are much more budget conscious now,” says Robbie Doherty, director of product and scheme compliance with AIB Merchant Services. “And young people are very aware of what they are outlaying. Travel may have increased since Covid but the overall spend is down. Being able to choose to use their own currency for holiday expenditure is very important.”

AIB Merchant Services has a proud tradition of innovation in the payment solutions landscape, he says. “We were the first people in the world to offer DCC back in the early 1990s. We initially started off in hotels and have expanded through hospitality and retail and into the online world.”

The AIB Merchant Services and Fexco partnership

Doherty says it has built a robust partnership with Fexco spanning almost three decades. “While we offer support across multiple currencies, it manages the real-time rate tables. All of this is underscored by a mutually beneficial revenue-sharing model. This long-standing collaboration spans from traditional point-of-sale to the evolving e-commerce landscape in the travel sector.”

The way we travel has changed. The number of customers using travel agents has diminished with a significant number of transactions now taking place online.

That’s where choice is important, says Doherty. “This technology offers customers the ability to pay in their home currency. By partnering with AIB Merchant Services and Fexco, Vueling can now offer that same capability to its customers.”

Charlotte Dumesnil, director of sales, distribution, and alliances at Vueling: 'Working with Fexco and AIB Merchant services has been a success since the beginning.'

The partnership between the three organisations dates back to 2019, according to Charlotte Dumesnil, director of sales, distribution, and alliances at Vueling. “We have been offering DCC to our customers for several years,” she says. “Working with Fexco and AIB Merchant services has been a success since the beginning. We have found the integration of their services really easy and simple. Very quickly we saw positive results. We launched the smartphone app in January of this year.”

The DCC capability is very important to Vueling. “As an airline, we have customers from around the world and being able to offer DCC to them is key,” says Dumesnil. “It gives them peace of mind. They know exactly what they will pay in their own currency and there are no surprises later. It’s really easy to understand. The flight ticket and all the other products and services we sell like seat bookings, extra baggage and so on are displayed in the currency of the customer’s choice. Anything we can do to improve our customers’ travel journey is important for us.”

This innovative and game-changing solution is the result of a strong commitment to refining and improving the offering in the marketplace . “We have been providing DCC solutions for 30 years,” says Blánaid Zanini, general manager DCC Europe at Fexco Payments and FX. “The solution has definitely stood the test of time. It provides consumers with the best available exchange rate at the time of transaction. For airline customers, an additional benefit is price comparison. You don’t need to try to calculate or look up an exchange rate to see the good value being offered by an airline like Vueling.”

It sounds very simple, and it is simple as far as the customer and the merchant are concerned, but the technology behind it is highly complex. For example, the solution needs to handle the instantaneous conversion of up to 200 different currency pairs. If a customer wants to pay in Turkish lira or Icelandic krona, it will offer that seamlessly and with no delay to the transaction.

And that’s just the start. “The exchange rates are updated up to six times a day and the customer is always offered the best available rate,” says Zanini. “It is all invisible to the customer and is a completely seamless process for the merchant. The merchant outsources its foreign exchange transactions to Fexco.”

Along with improved customer service, a key benefit for merchants is reduced foreign exchange risk. Vueling and other merchants who partner with AIB Merchant Services don’t have to worry about fluctuations in exchange rates, while they hold cash in different currencies.

“We enable all the transactions,” says Doherty. “AIB Merchant Services take the revenue in from the customers and then pay it to the merchant in whatever currency they want, regardless of the currency that the customers paid in. The merchant gets the currency they need to run its business. For example, airlines pay for fuel in American dollars, and they may have other bills in sterling. We can accommodate that. We also guarantee the value of the foreign exchange at the rate given to the customer at the time of the transaction.”

Also part of the IAG Group, Aer Lingus is a long-standing customer of ours,” says Zanini. “If one of its customers is in the US or the UK, its app or website already automatically converts the price to Euro if that’s what they want. There is very close cooperation between the airlines in the IAG Group,” adds Dumesnil. “Considering the benefits of the solution and the success of the relationship, it is natural that other airlines in the group are showing interest in it.”

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