Revenue protection and leakage identification has remained and will continue to remain critical to airline finance and commercials. Enough materials and evidence available have proven that the degree of leakage is constant for the past several years (0.2~1% of the total revenue), and therefore ripe for substantial innovation.
Traditional audit services performed either by airlines independantly or through BPO services still rely on a semi-automatic process of discovery of lost revenue throughout the journey of a ticket. In the most conservative case, an airline with USD 1 billion revenue can lose around 5 million every year.
Rassure has addressed this challenge for the airlines through a novel approach and the usage of artificial intelligence. Rassure’s platform RAXTM starts with 100% automation of the entire audit process. Rassure has mapped each scenario and all possible practical situations at airlines on the ground to understand the root cause of the potential fraud or error and highlights ways to mitigate it. These scenarios are built into a series of powerful algorithms which can perform over 500+ checks within a fraction of a second and with exceptional levels of accuracy within RAXTM. This is further augmented by natural language processing (NLP) technologies to mitigate relevant problems like commission agreements, regional deals, specific instructions etc which forms an essential part of the audit process. RAX does not miss a single scenario which is generally overlooked. For example, Direct Sales, Auto Priced tickets, and unproductive bookings are often ignored in an audit because it is assumed that either there is no need to check them (resource drain with no identification) or it may be too cumbersome to perform the checks. Rassure has identified that in fact these cases have a high potential for revenue leakage and should not be ignored. (0.05% of total violations).
Rassure uses a series of industry data together with the Airline data to simulate actual ticket conditions within RAXTM and to identify the violations to these tickets so that no parameters are missed out. One ticket could have been violated on multiple parameters. A detailed analysis also shows that some of the vital parameters can be used to design and align the commission structure for airlines, take informed decisions on the sales strategies, and rerun audits multiple times if any data element is missed. After all, machines never get tired or bored when repeating jobs!
COVID has taught us that we must do “more “with “less “. Digitalization and other disruptive technologies are the order of the day. The silos within an airline are getting blurred. There is no clear demarcation where the Revenue Integrity function stops for Finance and starts for Commercial. Revenue protection is the key aspect. Rassure is trying in its own way to help airlines in the new normal.
Vikram Joshi
Vice President and Head of Sales
Rassure PTY Ltd
