Airlines across Australia and Asia-Pacific have invested significantly in NDC connectivity, building APIs, configuring offer engines, and training distribution partners to sell richer, more personalised content. But for many carriers, the commercial returns are falling short of expectations. The bottleneck is rarely the NDC content layer. It is the payments infrastructure underneath it.
Legacy payments stacks were designed for a world of standardised fares, predictable BSP settlement cycles, and a narrow range of accepted payment methods. NDC changes all of that. Dynamic pricing, multi-component orders, real-time settlement, and a proliferating range of payment methods from digital wallets through to buy-now-pay-later create a payments complexity that most airline payment infrastructures were simply not built to handle.
WHY LEGACY PAYMENTS INFRASTRUCTURE FAILS IN THE NDC ENVIRONMENT
The performance gap between airlines extracting full commercial value from NDC and those that are not is rarely about distribution strategy. It is about payments architecture. When a dynamic offer cannot be settled cleanly, when ancillary components create reconciliation exceptions, when fraud rules calibrated for GDS transactions generate false positives in direct channels, the NDC investment delivers less than it should.
Legacy systems, manual reconciliation processes, and fragmented payment gateway configurations create friction at every stage of the NDC transaction lifecycle: offer acceptance, payment authorisation, settlement, refund processing, and reporting. Each friction point costs the airline in conversion loss, reconciliation overhead, chargeback exposure, and commercial blindness.
WHERE PAYMENTS ORCHESTRATION MOVES THE NEEDLE
The highest-value payments upgrades for NDC-ready airlines concentrate in five areas:
Payments orchestration layer — a single intelligent layer that routes transactions across acquirers, normalises payment data from NDC channels, and provides real-time visibility across every payment stream without replacing existing infrastructure.
Payment method expansion — accepting the methods that corporate and leisure buyers expect in NDC channels, including virtual cards, digital wallets, buy-now-pay-later, and local payment methods across Asia-Pacific markets, without creating settlement complexity.
Direct channel fraud detection — fraud models retrained on NDC direct channel transaction patterns, not GDS-era rules, reducing false positives by 30 to 50 per cent and protecting conversion in channels the airline now owns directly.
Offer-and-order reconciliation automation — continuous, automated matching of payment records to NDC order components, replacing manual exception queues with real-time flagging and structured resolution workflows.
Component-level refund and exchange automation — processing partial refunds and order modifications at the ancillary component level, eliminating the manual handling and chargeback exposure that legacy PSS-adjacent systems generate.
IMPLEMENTATION ROADMAP
This ebook walks through a phased approach to upgrading payments orchestration for the NDC era from diagnostic assessment and orchestration foundation through payment method expansion, fraud recalibration, and commercial intelligence. Each phase is structured to deliver measurable revenue improvement before the next begins, so the business case strengthens as the programme progresses.
Download the ebook below to access the full framework, use cases, and implementation guidance.
How to Upgrade Your Payments Orchestration for the NDC Era reveals a critical reality: airlines are not failing to extract value from NDC because of weak distribution strategy, but from payments infrastructure that was never designed for the offer-and-order model. Under mounting pressure to grow ancillary revenue, reduce settlement costs, and compete across a widening range of distribution channels, a fragmented payments stack delivers friction, not commercial performance.
Where do you start? How do you identify the specific payments gaps constraining your NDC commercial performance and close them without rebuilding your entire stack? This is precisely the challenge this ebook is designed to address.
This exclusive ebook is a practical guide for airline payments, finance, and technology leaders to assess their current payments architecture against NDC requirements, identify where revenue is leaking, and build the orchestration capability that turns payments infrastructure from a constraint into a commercial advantage.
Key takeaways from this ebook include:
Orchestration unlocks NDC value
Approval rates drive revenue
Payment data is commercial intelligence
See the Conexxia Impact: From Strategy to Measurable Outcomes
"High-performing airlines in the NDC era don't succeed by adding more payment gateways — they succeed by orchestrating every transaction for maximum approval, minimum leakage, and full commercial visibility."
Quantifiable Results We Deliver:
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Lift NDC authorisation rates through intelligent acquirer routing.
Reduce reconciliation exceptions by over 80% with automated offer-and-order matching.
Cut false positive fraud declines by 30–50% with direct channel-trained detection models.
Digitise refund and exchange workflows into trackable, component-level automated processes.
Stop Planning.
Start Executing.
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Frequently Asked Questions
1. Is this e-book really free?
Yes. This is a comprehensive, free resource from Conexxia to help Australian and Asia-Pacific airline leaders identify payments architecture gaps and build the orchestration capability to close them.
2. Who is this for?
This is for Heads of Payments, CFOs, CTOs, and Directors of Finance and Technology at Australian and Asia-Pacific airlines who are investing in NDC distribution and need their payments infrastructure to match that commercial ambition.
3. What will I learn?
You will get a practical, step-by-step framework for assessing your current payments stack against NDC requirements, identifying where conversion is being lost and revenue is leaking, and prioritising the orchestration upgrades that deliver the fastest measurable return.
4. Will I be contacted by sales?
Downloading the ebook gets you the resource. You can opt-out of further communications at any time. For a more personalised discussion, you can request a complimentary Payments Orchestration Readiness Assessment.