Travel & Hospitality · Customer since 2022
Kestrel Air
A Gulf-based regional airline pays hotel and ground-handling suppliers with virtual cards in each supplier's currency.
- FX cost on supplier payments
- −38%
- shorter month-end close
- 4 days
- invoices matched automatically
- 92%
Illustrative figures for a fictional customer.
The challenge
Kestrel pays several hundred suppliers across the Middle East, Europe and South Asia. Most were paid by international wire from a dirham account, with conversion handled by the receiving bank at a rate the finance team could not see in advance.
Reconciling each payment against an invoice took days, because wire references were truncated and the received amount rarely matched the invoice exactly.
The solution
Kestrel now issues a single-use virtual card per booking or invoice, denominated in the supplier's currency. Funds are converted once, at a quoted rate, from balances held in Multi-Currency & FX.
Each card carries the invoice reference in its metadata, so the transaction and the invoice match automatically when the supplier charges it.
Virtual cards in the supplier's currency removed a whole reconciliation step for our finance team.