Behind Flywire’s $330 Million Acquisition of Sertifi – and What’s Next

Travel companies, especially tour operators and independent hotels, often make customers jump through hoops to complete a booking.

For the businesses, old finance tech means navigating banks, credit card companies, currency exchange, and more — a cumbersome process that they often don’t have the resources to manage.  

Companies like Flywire aim to help travel businesses simplify and streamline payments, building a network of financial vendors that their clients can access through a tech platform. Most of Flywire’s clients are tour operators, destination management companies, and hotels. 

This week, it acquired Chicago-based Sertifi, which helps hotels streamline events contracting, group bookings, and their associated payments. The company has 20,000 hotel clients and 130 employees. 

Sertifi was founded in 2008 and never took outside funding. Its founders were the majority owners until this week.

Boston-based Flywire says the Sertifi acquisition adds a new category to its set of services and expands its travel footprint into new sectors, including large-scale branded hotels, luxury hotels, and boutique properties.

“Where we see this opportunity in travel generally is the digitization of the experience, and more and more transactions happening through an ecommerce or digital-like experience,” said Colin Smyth, senior vice president and general manager of travel at Flywire.

Smyth spoke with Skift about the market opportunity and what comes after the acquisition. 

What’s Driving So Much Growth in Travel Payments Tech?

• “I really believe that Covid was a forcing function for companies to evaluate not only their technology, but also their payments, and really all the vendors and partners they work with. That kind of forced everything 10 years past where it was.”
• “What we typically see in our business is antiquated systems, legacy systems, and people are patching things together — so, a reservation system that may not talk to its booking system that may not talk to its payment system. What Flywire enables, and what Sertifi will only allow us to do more of, is combine those things and create more efficiency for their businesses.”
• “More and more companies are going to start to value the role that payment plays … the idea that the invoice has the payment experience attached to it, and then it's reconciled back into that system of record. So you're creating a better guest experience, and you're creating a better, efficient system on the back end so that those accounting and finance teams can reconcile payments faster.” 

How Does the Opportunity Look in Travel?

Flywire’s travel business recently grew into the company’s second-largest in terms of revenue less ancillary services (its largest category is in the education sector). The travel business is growing at a faster rate than the general company, and Sertifi is expected to do the same. 

• “If you look at the [total addressable market] we have today, it's over $450 billion. We’re less than 1% penetrated into that, and that doesn't even include the Sertifi offering. So we see a huge opportunity to grow the current client business.”

What Comes After the Acquisition?

• “They're just in the early days of their payments business … We feel as though our global payment network, their very strong integrations and client list — not to mention the relationships they have — will allow us to grow rapidly together.”
• “Our ability to take them global is a huge win for us, especially with the brands that they already have. Think about Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, the number of international hotels they have. Our footprints in places like Japan, Australia, across the globe give us an advantage right away, and so we're working through all that right now.”

Interview has been edited for length and clarity.