Travel x Payments: The Profit Point
Thu Feb 12, 13:00 - Thu Feb 12, 14:30
Innovation City
ABOUT
Travel x Payments: The Profit Point
12 February 2025 | 13:00–14:30 | Innovation City Cape Town
Travel is a margin game and payments sit right at the point of profit. In this focused Web in Travel Pop-Up Vol 3 event, we unpack how African travel brands can reduce friction, improve conversion, fight fraud, and lower the cost of acceptance across cards, wallets, pay-by-bank, and cross-border flows. Expect practical lessons, live examples, and a clear roadmap you can apply immediately.
Who it’s for:
- Founders and leaders at OTAs, airlines, hotels, TMCs, and tour operators
- Product, Growth, and CX teams shaping checkout and refunds
- Fintech/PSP, acquirer, and bank partners working with travel merchants
- Finance leaders (CFOs/Controllers) focused on reconciliation and cost control
What you’ll get:
- A snapshot of the travel-payments landscape in South Africa and across Africa
- Tactics to lift checkout conversion and reduce abandonment
- Fraud, chargeback, and refund best practices tailored to travel
- How to optimise routing, settlement, and cost of acceptance with PSPs
- Playbook for wallets, pay-by-bank, BNPL, and cross-border acceptance
- A readiness checklist for Q4–Q1 rollouts and partner evaluations
- High-value networking with peers and payment specialists
Join us to turn payments from a pain point into a competitive advantage.
SPEAKERS
Paulina Klotzbücher is a seasoned travel-tech and fintech leader with more than 15 years’ senior leadership experience across the travel and payments sectors. She founded Glyde Payments (Glyde Pay) in early 2021, setting out to transform the way supplier payments are done in the travel industry—particularly in highly intermediated markets and under stringent regulation in South Africa.
Prior to launching Glyde, Paulina held senior roles at Travelstart where she shaped commercial strategy, digital product, operations, supply chain, and regional growth. Her roles have spanned CTO, CMO, Managing Director, Digital Officer and more — giving her deep technical, operational, financial, and market insight.
At Glyde Pay, under her leadership, the company has developed a virtual-card solution for supplier payments, aimed at bringing transparency, automation, and control to a segment of the travel industry long underserved and misunderstood. The solution is built in partnership with major players (including Mastercard, Access Bank) to navigate regulatory complexity, especially in a market recently grey-listed.
Based in Cape Town, Paulina is known for combining technical expertise with strategic commercial acumen, and for building innovation that addresses real challenges in payments for travel and hospitality. She is also active in wider travel-tech/fintech ecosystems (events, advisory) in Africa.
PARKING
Location: We're just off Kloof Street on Darter Road.
Traffic Alert: Please be cautious of traffic heading into town.
Parking Options:
- Parking options around Kloof Street
Recommended: It's always best to use Uber for convenience.
VIDEO
INNOVATION CITY MEMBERS
NOTE: Innovation City members can get free access to all IC weekly events. (You will find the discount code on the IC app.)
EVENT ATTENDANCE
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DISCLAIMER
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