Smart simplicity: AirPlus reveals a refreshed brand identity

Neu-Isenburg, November 14, 2023

Corporate payment expert AirPlus International presented its transformed brand identity today at GBTA + VDR Europe Conference 2023. This move comes as a logical step after the company’s extensive investments in a new state-of-the-art IT landscape as well as broadening its focus from business travel management provider to corporate payment player.

Michael Heilmann, Executive Director Marketing of AirPlus International, explained: “As many other areas of daily life, also payments have become more and more digital, with the global pandemic further accelerating this development for both consumer and corporate solutions. To offer customers intelligent, market-leading products and services even faster than before, AirPlus has built a completely new IT infrastructure and digitized all products, thereby simplifying numerous processes for customers. Moreover, we have enabled companies to easily pay for business expenses outside business travel by launching dedicated virtual credit cards and by entering into partnerships with several prominent players of the procurement industry.”

The embodiment of this transformation is the new brand identity, featuring a bold design as well as the new claim “Smarter payment. Better business”. The declared mission of AirPlus is to make corporate payments as simple and smart as possible, so clients can focus on what matters most to them. To accomplish this, AirPlus is relying on four key pillars:

• Customer experience: In more than 30 years, AirPlus has established a profound market knowledge as well as trusting relationships with customers, proven by a retention rate of 97%. The company puts big emphasis on offering an excellent individualized customer service with dedicated experts at each step of the journey – always inhouse, never outsourced.
• Intelligent integration: AirPlus has connected more than 4,000 partners and data sources and closely collaborates with more than 60 IT partners to ensure that all solutions can be seamlessly integrated into any customer ecosystem. This allows customers to save processing costs and prevent errors.
• Quality data & solutions: AirPlus solutions unite a rich data quality with global acceptance while complying with the highest security standards. Clients profit from customizable invoices as well as an automated invoice reconciliation to let their data work for them. This is highlighted by industry leading ratings with a data quality completeness value of ~95% and a reconciliation rate of 99.7%.
• Partner network: AirPlus’ industry-leading partner network provides a global scope and worldwide acceptance. Today, it consists of more than 4,000 partners from all industries – airlines, ground mobility, fintechs, travel & expense companies, hotels, procurement, aggregators, intermediates, insurance, the events industry, and more. AirPlus payment solutions are accepted by over 32 million merchants around the world.

Simple and smart in practice: AirPlus Portal, intelligent data analyses, virtual credit cards & new partnerships

AirPlus has already proven what the principle “simple and smart” means in practice for customers by launching the following:

• AirPlus Portal: The AirPlus Portal functions as a pan-European payment hub, allowing travel managers to consistently onboard and manage a multi-country card program by involving all relevant stakeholders. The digital process enables travel managers to orchestrate corporate cards and virtual cards for fifteen European countries. Card holders benefit both from fast onboarding, online services and ability to pay instantly and seamlessly with their mobile phones.
• Intelligent data analyses: The AirPlus Intelligence Hub is the first milestone and homepage of the upcoming analytics platform AirPlus Intelligence. It delivers valuable information on the most relevant spend metrics with a simple dashboard design. Additional analytics modules will soon provide deeper insight into spend data according to different customer needs.
• AirPlus Virtual Cards Procurement: With AirPlus Virtual Cards Procurement, customers can pay for online and ad-hoc purchases across a broad range of goods and services, from hardware, software licenses, office supplies, books and magazines to online ads and domains. A virtual credit card is generated to pay for each transaction, with worldwide acceptance thanks to the global Mastercard network. All transactions are subsequently settled centrally and combined into a single statement. This is efficient and saves on process-related costs.
• New partnerships in procurement: To ensure solutions can be easily integrated into customers’ ecosystems and to drive growth in the field of B2B payments, AirPlus has entered into several partnerships. Among them are Coupa Software (NASDAQ: COUP), a leader in Business Spend Management (BSM), Mazepay, THL Pay and Piteco.

Michael Heilmann continued: “Our refreshed brand identity is the result of over a year of market research, testing, and conducting interviews with customers as well as partners. It puts our look and voice in line with who we are as a company. Equipped with our new state-of-the-art IT platform and our vision for B2B payments, we have created a future-proof AirPlus. With our recent and upcoming product launches, we fulfill our promise to make corporate payments as simple and smart as possible, so our clients can focus on their own business.”

Refreshing the AirPlus brand identity

The project to further develop AirPlus’ corporate identity was accompanied by the brand and design agency Peter Schmidt Group, using extensive global research as the basis. In quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews and internal ideation sessions, AirPlus and Peter Schmidt Group included a total of >680 customers, prospects and partners as well as >360 employees. In addition, they analyzed digital and traditional media using ten different listening and monitoring tools. Key brand elements were tested with >3650 participants globally.

About AirPlus International:

AirPlus International is a leading international provider of corporate payment solutions. 53,000 corporate customers rely on AirPlus for the payment and evaluation of their business trips and other purchasing services. The products and services are marketed worldwide under the AirPlus International brand. AirPlus is an issuer of the UATP and Mastercard card schemes. The AirPlus Company Account is the most successful billing account within the UATP. For more information, visit airplus.com.