WFS & WPS 2025 Speech - Sandrine Le Borgne, Senior Vice President, Corporate Services & Chief Financial Officer, IATA

Introduction

Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the 2025 IATA World Financial Symposium and World Passenger Symposium.

It is a pleasure to be in Istanbul, and I will start by thanking our host, Turkish Airlines, for the warm welcome.

Turkish Airlines is a great supporter of IATA right from the top. We are privileged to have Dr. Ahmet Bolat, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of Turkish Airlines as a long-serving member of the IATA Board of Directors.

Dr. Bolatand his team always make us feel very at home here in Istanbul.

It's inspiring to see so many leaders from finance, commercial, operations, IT, and customer experience gathered together.

This joint event is unique. Retail, passenger experience and financial resilience are often discussed separately, but in reality, they are inseparable.

A seamless journey for passengers cannot happen without financial sustainability, and financial sustainability depends on delivering real value to passengers.

"What if" Scenario - The Headaches Ahead

To set the scene for our conference, let's start by looking at some "what if" scenarios.

What if every airline could deliver exactly what each traveler wants-personalized offers, payments made the way they choose, and a seamless travel experience managed entirely through their smartphone?

What if financial events along the passenger journey could be supported end to end seamlessly by commercial, operations and finance together, with AI enabling real-time insights and decision-making?

What if we could finally leave behind the complexity of decades-old legacy systems that were never designed for modern retailing-the manual workarounds, reconciliations, and inefficiencies-and replace them with modern, connected digital processes?

The Reality Today - Pain Points

The transformation toward seamless, digitally enabled travel is underway but it's progressing unevenly.

The technology exists, but implementation isn't simple. Airline management teams are juggling a long list of urgent, often competing priorities.

CEOs need to navigate challenges from supply chain constraints and sustainability demands to evolving consumer expectations and regulatory change.

CFOs must fund innovation while maintaining financial discipline, unlocking returns on the investments already made, and navigating an increasingly unstable environment shaped by tariffs, inflation, and geopolitical uncertainty.

CROs or CCOs are focused on driving transformation across every customer touchpoint-retailing, payments, servicing, and loyalty-while still managing legacy infrastructure and fragmented data.

Meanwhile Chief Operating Officers (COOs), must deliver the passenger experience every day ensuring safety, reliability, and on-time performance while introducing new digital processes that make travel smoother and more predictable.

Across every function, there's a common constraint: outdated legacy systems. PNRs. Paper documents. Printed boarding passes. Disconnected data. They're the invisible barrier standing between us and the seamless "what if" future we all imagine.

That's why we're all here at WPS and WFS: to confront these barriers together and reimagine what air travel can be.

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?"

We are transforming…and our customers expect to see us transformed!

From Pain Points to Progress - and the GPS Reveal

Over the next two days at WFS and WPS, we're here to close the gap, between where we are, and where passengers expect us to be.

Later this morning, we'll share the 2025 IATA Global Passenger Survey, a reality check from our customers.

It tells us how far we've come and how much further we need to go.

Because digital transformation isn't just about tech. It's about people-and designing processes that meet their expectations.

That's why collaboration through IATA matters. Together, we turn vision into execution with global standards, shared frameworks, and strategic partnerships that make scalable progress possible.

And you've made your priorities clear:

• Offers and Orders with modern accounting
• Modernizing payments
• Implementing end-to-end digital identity

So where do we stand?

Three Priorities for Digital Transformation

Firstly, the foundations have been laid for the shift to Offers and Orders with Modern Accounting.

The first set of standards, the business reference architecture and the first implementations are all ready and agreed through IATA with our partners across the value chain.

IATA is also working to enable the shift to Offers and Orders through the BSP, ensuring that airlines relying on the BSP will be able to 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.

And that will be the most significant transformation of aviation in decades, creating operational, commercial, and financial value across the industry.

Secondly, we are unlocking opportunities as we try to make payments more efficient and reduce the US$22 billion cost burden that payments places on airlines collectively.

Payments are not a back-office detail; they are a strategic agenda item. Modern payment solutions can reduce cost, enhance customer choice, and free up capital for innovation and sustainability.

The growing success of IATA's solutions such as the IATA Financial Gateway (IFG) - IATA Pay and Easy Pay.

And these next days are an opportunity to see how we can do more with IATA Pay, digital wallets, and biometric solutions-all standards that we have worked on together-to transform payments for the better.

Next, we'll look at how to accelerate the implementation of Digital Identity End-to-End.

The standards exist with ICAO's Digital Travel Credential (DTC), Europe's eIDAS, and IATA's One ID framework. In fact, the IATA One ID program has been facilitating and documenting successful use cases around the world-where passengers use digital credentials and biometrics to move through the journey without presenting physical documents.

To support airlines, IATA has also launched the Contactless Travel Directory- a new tool that makes it easier for airlines to identify and connect with biometric solution providers globally.

Momentum is building. But we're still far from a critical mass of implementations that would satisfy what passengers want: a fast, document-free journey-not just at one airport, but at every airport.

So over the next few days we'll look for ways to scale pilot projects into an interoperable global system.

Collaboration and Leadership

And that brings me to my final point: we'll only succeed if we work together. There's real purpose behind the expertise gathered in this room-collaboration is how we turn vision into reality.

The challenge we are facing is a business-model redesign that depends on finance, technology, and customer insight working hand in hand.

And now, to officially open this year's joint symposium, it's my great pleasure to hand over to our host - a leader that embodies innovation, ambition, and connection: the CEO of Turkish Airlines.

Thank you.