Delivering the opening remarks, Sandrine Le Borgne, Senior Vice President, Corporate Services & Chief Financial Officer of IATA, welcomed delegates to the joint event, emphasizing the significance of holding both symposiums together. “Retail, passenger experience, and financial resilience are often discussed separately, but in reality, they are inseparable,” she stated. “A seamless journey for passengers cannot happen without financial sustainability, and financial sustainability depends on delivering real value to passengers.”

Le Borgne extended appreciation to Turkish Airlines for hosting the event, acknowledging the airline’s ongoing support for IATA and the active involvement of its Chairman, Dr. Ahmet Bolat, who serves as a long-standing member of the IATA Board of Directors.

Addressing the Industry’s Transformation Challenges

Le Borgne noted that while the transformation toward digitally enabled, seamless air travel is underway, it remains uneven. The existing technology offers immense potential, but airlines are faced with complex implementation challenges.

“Airline management teams are juggling a long list of urgent, often competing priorities,” she explained, citing pressures ranging from supply chain disruptions and sustainability demands to regulatory changes and inflation.

She highlighted the burden of legacy systems—such as outdated Passenger Name Records (PNRs), paper-based processes, and fragmented data—as a major obstacle. “They’re the invisible barrier standing between us and the seamless ‘what if’ future we all imagine,” she said.

Le Borgne emphasized that passengers increasingly expect the same digital convenience in air travel that they experience in other industries. “Our passengers are already living digitally in every other part of their lives. They see glimpses of progress in aviation—biometric gates here, digital boarding there—and they’re asking: ‘Why can’t air travel deliver the same seamless experience everywhere?’”

From Vision to Action: Three Priorities for Digital Transformation

In outlining IATA’s strategic priorities, Le Borgne identified three key focus areas driving the industry’s digital evolution:

1. Offers and Orders with Modern Accounting
   The foundational standards and reference architectures for the shift to Offers and Orders are already established through IATA’s collaborative framework. The next step, she said, is full-scale adoption powered by open standards, marking one of the most significant transformations in aviation in decades.
2. Modernizing Payments
   With global airline payment costs amounting to approximately US$22 billion annually, Le Borgne called for greater efficiency through modern payment solutions such as IATA Pay, Easy Pay, and the IATA Financial Gateway (IFG). “Payments are not a back-office detail; they are a strategic agenda item,” she noted, stressing that innovative payment systems can reduce costs, enhance customer choice, and free up capital for innovation and sustainability.
3. Accelerating End-to-End Digital Identity
   IATA’s One ID initiative, in alignment with ICAO’s Digital Travel Credential (DTC) and Europe’s eIDAS framework, continues to advance contactless, biometric-enabled passenger processing. To support airlines, IATA has launched the Contactless Travel Directory, a global resource connecting carriers with biometric solution providers.

While progress is being made, Le Borgne acknowledged that the industry is still far from achieving the critical mass of implementations needed for a truly global, document-free travel experience. The symposium aims to explore pathways for scaling successful pilot projects into interoperable global systems.

Collaboration as the Key to Industry Progress

Concluding her remarks, Le Borgne underscored that collaboration will be essential to achieving these ambitions. “We’ll only succeed if we work together,” she said. “The challenge we are facing is a business-model redesign that depends on finance, technology, and customer insight working hand in hand.”