How Cathay Pacific built a payments setup for global growth

Airlines have multiple payment touchpoints, from airport counters to call centers and mobile apps. In the past, Cathay Pacific managed these through separate connections, creating complexity across maintenance, reconciliation, and performance analysis.

Cathay Pacific wanted something simpler. They needed a system that would let them understand performance issues faster, reducing the manual work involved in reconciliation and data analysis.

The company was also expanding beyond flights into hotels, retail, and other customer experiences, adding more payment touchpoints and increasing the need for a scalable foundation.

Cathay Pacific began its relationship with Adyen using a gateway service. After evaluating different vendors, the team chose Adyen for its global payments capabilities and ability to support Cathay Pacific as it expanded.

As Cathay Pacific’s needs evolved, the partnership expanded to include processing and acquiring. Today, Cathay Pacific uses Adyen across gateway, processing, and acquiring capabilities through a single integration.

“Our Adyen account manager has made a huge difference,” said Percy. “Whenever we want to expand to a new market, Adyen has a team that helps us make it possible.”

Moving to Adyen’s full stack services meant Cathay Pacific could expand without adding unnecessary complexity. Rather than building a new payments structure each time it entered a new market, the payments team can rely on Adyen’s existing infrastructure to support its growth.

To date, Cathay Pacific has used Adyen to expand to markets like Australia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the US and most recently India. They’ve rolled out more than 18 payment methods.

Together, Adyen’s acquiring capabilities and local payment methods help Cathay Pacific support shoppers across global markets.

Cathay Pacific’s expansion into India demonstrated the importance of combining global scale with local payment capabilities. As a highly regulated market, authorization rates for international payment methods in India are typically lower than local options.

For Cathay Pacific, this created an opportunity: How could they improve payment performance, optimize authorization rates, and elevate the customer experience at the same time?

The answer was to introduce local payment methods through Adyen’s local acquiring capabilities. With Adyen’s acquiring solution in place, Cathay Pacific saw a 10% increase in authorization rates in India, contributing to higher conversion and revenue.

“Adyen’s local acquiring helped us improve our operations significantly,” says Percy. “It led to a 10% conversion rate increase and higher revenue, as well as a better customer experience. It has also simplified processes such as refunds, helping us make every customer interaction as seamless as possible.”

Percy also commented that the local payment methods save his team time. “Working with Adyen means less operational complexity on the backend, which means we have more time to focus on our goals.”

Cathay Pacific’s work with Adyen goes beyond payment processing. The two companies are actively working on innovative projects that use payment solutions that can improve the customer experience.

To stay ahead, Cathay Pacific’s team has internal working groups dedicated to innovation, and those working groups contribute feedback and research to Adyen’s product development. “Both of our companies have grown over the last ten years. We’ve built a strong partnership with Adyen, and we’re getting better together,” said Percy.

When asked about what makes their innovation possible, Percy said it was the human touch. “We really appreciate our account manager’s professional service and the tech support we get from Adyen. They know our needs because they understand our entire architecture.”

Cathay Pacific’s work with Adyen doesn’t stop once a new market or payment method goes live. The teams continue to look for ways to improve payment performance, reduce costs, and make the customer experience more seamless.

As part of this, Cathay Pacific has worked with Adyen to enable capabilities within Adyen Uplift that help balance conversion, customer experience, and fraud prevention. The teams continue to review performance and explore new ways to optimize the payments setup as the business evolves.

Cathay Pacific is also looking to connect customer experiences across channels. Over the years, Cathay Pacific has expanded its customer experience beyond flights into retail, wellness, dining, and holidays. Moving forward, it wants to connect those customer experiences across all channels.

The company has introduced S1F2 terminals to its retail store in Hong Kong SAR China. Over time, the goal is to connect online and in-person payment data to create a more complete view of the customer and support more personalized experiences.

Cathay Pacific is also exploring how agentic commerce could shape the future of airline distribution and payments. A key question is how to enable AI agents to complete purchases smoothly, while maintaining the security and control customers expect.

“In payments, we’re always looking for new solutions,” says Percy. “Adyen helps us understand what’s happening in the industry and brings new functionality that can support our future plans.”

Cathay Pacific has established a task force to assess the opportunity, including the operational and security considerations, and is working with Adyen as it develops its approach.

Ask Cathay Pacific what it wants from payments, and the answer is simple. “Our goal is to unify the customer experience across channels and make it feel effortless,” Percy says. “That’s the kind of experience we’re working toward with Adyen.”

Over the last decade, Cathay Pacific has transformed its payments setup into a more streamlined, scalable foundation for growth. Today, it can support customers across markets and channels while continuing to explore new ways to improve the experience.

“Adyen’s global reach has helped us process more transactions, and the operational efficiencies across the full stack give us more control,” says Percy. “We’re excited to keep building.”