Welcome to the 2025 IATA World Financial Symposium and World Passenger Symposium! I'm Sandrine Le Borgne, Senior Vice President of Corporate Services and Chief Financial Officer at IATA. It's an honor to be in Istanbul, and I'd like to extend my gratitude to Turkish Airlines for their warm hospitality. Turkish Airlines has been a steadfast supporter of IATA, with Dr. Ahmet Bolat, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee, serving on our Board of Directors for many years. Dr. Bolat and his team have made us feel right at home in Istanbul.
It's inspiring to see so many leaders from finance, commercial, operations, IT, and customer experience gathered here. This joint event is unique, as it brings together discussions on retail, passenger experience, and financial resilience, which are often treated as separate topics. However, in reality, they are interconnected and interdependent.
To illustrate, a seamless journey for passengers cannot be achieved without financial sustainability, and financial sustainability relies on delivering real value to passengers. Now, let's explore some 'what if' scenarios to set the stage for our conference.
What if every airline could cater to each traveler's preferences, offering personalized offers, allowing payments in their preferred methods, and managing the entire travel experience through their smartphones? What if financial events along the passenger journey could be seamlessly supported by commercial, operations, and finance teams, with AI providing real-time insights and decision-making? What if we could finally bid farewell to the complexity of decades-old legacy systems, which were never designed for modern retailing, and replace them with modern, connected digital processes?
While the transformation towards seamless, digitally-enabled travel is underway, it's progressing unevenly. The technology exists, but implementation is challenging. Airline management teams face a multitude of urgent priorities, often competing with each other. CEOs must navigate supply chain constraints, sustainability demands, evolving consumer expectations, and regulatory changes. CFOs need to balance funding innovation with maintaining financial discipline, unlocking returns on investments, and managing an unstable environment shaped by tariffs, inflation, and geopolitical uncertainty. CROs or CCOs focus on transforming every customer touchpoint, from retailing to payments, servicing, and loyalty, while dealing with legacy infrastructure and fragmented data.
Chief Operating Officers (COOs) play a crucial role in delivering the passenger experience daily, ensuring safety, reliability, and on-time performance, while also introducing new digital processes to make travel smoother and more predictable. Across all functions, a common constraint is the presence of outdated legacy systems, PNRs, paper documents, printed boarding passes, and disconnected data, which act as an invisible barrier to achieving the seamless 'what if' future we envision.
That's why we're gathered here at WPS and WFS: to collectively confront these barriers and reimagine the possibilities of air travel. Our passengers are already living digitally in various aspects of their lives, and they're curious why air travel can't offer the same seamless experience everywhere. We are committed to transformation, and our customers expect to see us evolve!
Over the next two days at WFS and WPS, we aim to bridge the gap between our current state and the expectations of our passengers. Later this morning, we will unveil the 2025 IATA Global Passenger Survey, providing a reality check from our customers. This survey will help us understand how far we've come and how much further we need to go.
Digital transformation isn't solely about technology; it's about people and designing processes that meet their expectations. That's why collaboration through IATA is essential. Together, we can turn our vision into execution using global standards, shared frameworks, and strategic partnerships, enabling scalable progress.
You've expressed your priorities clearly:
- Offers and Orders with modern accounting
- Modernizing payments
- Implementing end-to-end digital identity
Now, let's delve into our progress and the three key priorities for digital transformation.
Firstly, the groundwork has been laid for the shift to Offers and Orders with Modern Accounting. The business reference architecture and the first implementations have been agreed upon by IATA and our partners across the value chain. IATA is also working to enable this transition through the BSP, ensuring that airlines relying on the BSP can participate in the future of airline retailing.
The next step is to move from pilots and projects to full-scale adoption, powered by IATA's open standards. This transformation will be one of the most significant in aviation in decades, creating operational, commercial, and financial value across the industry.
Secondly, we are exploring opportunities to make payments more efficient and reduce the US$22 billion cost burden that payments impose on airlines collectively. Payments are not a back-office detail; they are a strategic agenda item. Modern payment solutions can reduce costs, enhance customer choice, and free up capital for innovation and sustainability.
The success of IATA's solutions, such as the IATA Financial Gateway (IFG), IATA Pay, and Easy Pay, is growing. The upcoming days will showcase how we can further enhance payments using IATA Pay, digital wallets, and biometric solutions, all of which are standards we've worked on together.
Next, we'll discuss how to accelerate the implementation of Digital Identity End-to-End. Standards already exist, such as ICAO's Digital Travel Credential (DTC), Europe's eIDAS, and IATA's One ID framework. The IATA One ID program has successfully facilitated and documented use cases worldwide, where passengers use digital credentials and biometrics to navigate the journey without physical documents.
To support airlines, IATA has launched the Contactless Travel Directory, a new tool that simplifies the process for airlines to identify and connect with biometric solution providers globally. While momentum is building, we are still far from achieving the critical mass of implementations that passengers desire: a fast, document-free journey, not just at one airport but at every airport.
Over the next few days, we'll explore ways to scale pilot projects into an interoperable global system.
Finally, I want to emphasize that our success depends on collaboration. The expertise gathered in this room has a real purpose, and collaboration is the key to turning our vision into reality. The challenge we face is a business-model redesign that requires finance, technology, and customer insight to work in harmony.
And now, it's my pleasure to officially open this year's joint symposium by handing over to our host, a leader who embodies innovation, ambition, and connection: the CEO of Turkish Airlines.
