IATA selects Kale’s APEXT for neutral fare proration service

Mumbai: Kale Consultants has been selected by International Air Transport Association (IATA) as one of the two suppliers for their neutral fare proration service to airlines.

IATA’s vision is to create a process that would involve ‘first and final’ settlement of interline bills between airlines. This would eliminate the problem of duplicate proration and the high level of rejection of interline bills by airlines. IATA expects this process to provide airlines with significant cost reduction and improvements in the quality and timeliness of information.

In order to establish this service for airlines, IATA had undertaken an evaluation of the various proration engines in the market. As a result of this evaluation, IATA identified two proration engines — APEXT from Kale and CIPS from ATPCO — as being equally suited to provide neutral prorate service.

APEXT, from Kale, one of the most sophisticated products in the market for passenger ticket Proration, is capable of handling the most complex special prorate and code-share agreements. This eliminates manual proration calculations, leading to unparalleled accuracy in interline billing and considerable productivity gains.

APEXT forms an integral part of Reverat, the revenue accounting solution which is used to provide Kale’s outsourced revenue accounting service to its customers. “We have consistently invested in upgrading the functional and technological features of our products to keep pace with changing market needs. This selection by IATA is in recognition of our efforts,” says Kale Consultants managing director Vipul Jain.

Kale and IATA are conducting a functional gap analysis between APEXT and the neutral fare proration working group’s requirements. This exercise, along with discussions on other contractual details, is currently under way.

Kale airlines division president Ashish Malhotra says: “In these trying times, airlines realise the need for an effective proration engine for improving their cash flows. I am confident that APEXT will go a long way in assisting airlines to substantially enhance productivity and minimise their interline losses. As an IATA partnership programme member, Kale has been associated with IATA in a number of initiatives and this success confirms the need and the importance of the relationship.”

The IATA revenue accounting panel carried out a study in conjunction with consultants, for the purpose of describing the future of revenue accounting within the airline industry. One specific work stream identified in this study was the creation of a neutral fare proration process. This would enable the airlines to have the facility of receiving fully prorated sales data for use in their revenue accounting systems.

Kale Consultants is a leading IT solutions provider for the airline and banking industries. Leveraging three strategically located development centres in India, Kale is a global organisation with over 600 professionals, six international offices and customers in more than 20 countries across the world.

An end-to-end solutions provider, Kale offers business process outsourcing services, custom-made development, application management, and re-engineering services. It also offers cutting-edge product solutions for the airlines, banking and healthcare industries.