The association’s new Airline Payment Framework puts numbers to something the industry has known for years. Whether African carriers act on it is a different question entirely.
IATA published a striking figure this week. According to its 2025 Global Passenger Survey, 17 percent of travellers who attempted to purchase an ancillary service, an extra bag, a seat upgrade, a preferred row, could not complete that purchase. Not because they changed their minds. Because the payment failed and no alternative was available.
The implication is direct: airlines are losing ancillary revenue not at the offer stage, not at the pricing stage, but at the final step. The passenger had already decided to buy. The product was ready. The sale fell apart because the payment infrastructure could not close it.
Nick Careen, IATA’s Senior Vice President for Operations, Safety and Security, framed it plainly in an opinion piece published on 3 August. Payment, he wrote, is no longer an administrative function. It is a strategic capability that influences revenue, customer experience, and cash flow. IATA estimates that airlines processed approximately USD 977 billion in payments during 2024, at a cost of USD 22.2 billion. The scale of that number alone, almost a trillion dollars in payment volume, makes the case that this deserves boardroom attention rather than a line item in the finance department’s budget.
To support airlines in making more structured decisions, IATA has introduced the Airline Payment Framework, designed to give commercial, finance, treasury, and technology teams a common lens through which to evaluate payment options across cost, fraud risk, settlement speed, customer experience, and cash flow. The goal is to prevent fragmented decisions that solve one problem while creating others.
It is a sensible framework. The challenge is that it reflects the realities of a global industry where international card payments and established settlement mechanisms remain dominant, even though many regions, particularly across Africa, rely on a far more diverse mix of local payment methods and financial infrastructure. That is not the environment most African airlines operate in.
Across Africa, the payment landscape is fractured in ways that make the global 17 percent failure rate look conservative. A carrier serving six West African markets may be accepting payments in six different currencies, through half a dozen local payment methods, with settlement timelines that vary from days to weeks depending on the market. Mobile money, which dominates consumer finance across much of sub-Saharan Africa, remains inconsistently integrated across airline booking flows, with meaningful adoption in East Africa but far patchier coverage in West and Central African markets. The IATA Financial Gateway and IATA Pay, which the framework promotes as tools for modernisation, have limited adoption across the continent’s domestic and regional carriers.
The result is that African airlines are exposed to exactly the revenue risk IATA is describing, but at a scale that is amplified by infrastructure gaps that the global framework does not fully address. When a payment fails in Frankfurt, the passenger usually has three other options on the screen. When a payment fails in Lomé or Luanda, the booking may simply end.
None of this is new knowledge. African airline finance and treasury teams have been navigating payment complexity for years, absorbing FX losses, managing chargebacks, and reconciling across systems that were not built to talk to each other. What IATA’s framework offers is a formalisation of the problem and a structured vocabulary for discussing it internally. That is genuinely useful, even if the solutions it points toward require significant adaptation for African market conditions.
The more consequential question is what comes next. IATA has provided the framework. African airlines now need to decide whether payment strategy rises to the level of a commercial priority or continues to sit in the treasury department, managed reactively rather than strategically. That decision will increasingly affect not just their ancillary revenue, but their ability to compete in a retailing environment where offer personalisation, dynamic pricing, and modern checkout experiences are becoming baseline expectations rather than competitive advantages.
For many African carriers, modernising payments is unlikely to begin with replacing existing systems. The more immediate opportunity lies in expanding local payment acceptance, integrating mobile money alongside international cards, improving payment orchestration to route transactions more intelligently, and working with regional fintech partners that understand local settlement and regulatory requirements. Those changes may lack the visibility of fleet announcements or new routes, but they can have a direct impact on conversion rates and ancillary revenue.
The 17 percent failure rate is only the visible symptom. The larger issue is that every failed payment represents a customer who was already ready to buy. As airline retailing becomes more sophisticated, payments will increasingly determine whether offers become revenue or simply abandoned bookings. For many African airlines, the biggest opportunity may no longer be creating better offers, but ensuring customers can actually pay for them.
Travel Distribution News covers airline distribution, NDC, and travel payments across Africa and emerging markets. For more analysis, visit traveldistributionnews.com.
