Accelya has received recognition under IATA’s Airline Retailing Maturity index for capabilities spanning Shop, Order, Pay and Account under the IATA 24.1 standard, a milestone that positions the company among a small group of vendors able to demonstrate end-to-end retailing capability against the industry’s emerging compliance framework.
The recognition, announced on May 20, covers four of the six streams in IATA’s ARM Capabilities Verification pillar and reflects the scope of Accelya’s FLX ONE platform across the commercial, operational and financial workflows that modern airline retailing requires.
The ARM index matters in part because of what it replaces. IATA has formally retired the NDC and ONE Order certification registries in favor of the ARM framework, which it describes as a more comprehensive reference for measuring where airlines and their technology partners stand on the journey toward modern retailing.
Where NDC certification focused primarily on connectivity standards, whether a system could send and receive NDC messages, the ARM index evaluates capability across a broader lifecycle. Its six streams, Shop, Order, Pay, Account, Settle and Setup, map to the full sequence of transactions involved in selling, managing and settling airline products in a modern retailing environment.
For technology vendors, ARM recognition under the Capabilities Verification pillar is the mechanism through which the industry can now assess whether a platform genuinely supports modern retailing end-to-end, or whether its capabilities are concentrated at the offer layer while downstream workflows remain dependent on legacy infrastructure.
Accelya’s recognition across Shop, Order, Pay and Account covers the core commercial and financial arc of a retailing transaction. Shop encompasses offer creation, pricing and merchandising. Order covers order management, servicing and fulfillment. Pay addresses payment processing and collection. Account relates to revenue accounting, reconciliation and financial reporting. The two streams not included in the current recognition, Settle and Setup, cover interline settlement and system configuration respectively.
Tim Reiz, Accelya’s Chief Product Technology Officer, framed the significance around the gap that often exists between offer creation and downstream execution. “Modern airline retailing does not stop when an offer is created,” he said. “The value comes when airlines can connect offers to orders, payment, servicing, accounting, delivery and settlement.”
That framing speaks to a persistent challenge in airline technology: offers have become increasingly sophisticated, but the infrastructure to manage, settle and account for those offers at scale has lagged. Vendors recognized under multiple ARM streams are, in effect, signaling that their platforms address that gap rather than concentrating investment at the digital storefront.
Accelya’s FLX ONE platform currently handles around half of global NDC volumes, processes 8 trillion offers per year and settles more than $100 billion annually. Those numbers position it as one of the highest-volume retailing platforms in the industry and give its ARM recognition practical weight beyond a standards compliance milestone. The platform is built on an open, modular architecture designed to allow airlines to modernize incrementally rather than replace entire technology stacks in a single transition.
The ARM recognition sits within a wider set of investments Accelya is making in the next phase of airline retailing infrastructure. The company is developing AI-enabled capabilities through its FLX AIViator product, expanding its cloud infrastructure in collaboration with AWS, and engaging with IATA’s Modular Exchange Framework, an initiative aimed at enabling interoperability between retailing components across different vendors and airline systems.
The Modular Exchange Framework is particularly significant for the industry’s longer-term direction. If adopted at scale, it would reduce the dependency airlines face when retailing capabilities are bundled within a single vendor stack, allowing them to mix components from different providers while maintaining standards-aligned interoperability. Accelya’s participation signals both a commercial interest in that architecture and a degree of confidence that its platform can operate effectively within a multi-vendor environment.
For airlines in Africa and emerging markets navigating NDC adoption while managing legacy distribution infrastructure, the ARM framework provides a clearer basis for evaluating technology partners than the certification registries it replaces. Recognitions like Accelya’s 24.1 result will increasingly serve as reference points in vendor selection conversations as retailing modernization accelerates across the region.
