Conferma Sets New Industry Standard for Hotel Payment Reliability With Launch of the Virtual Card Performance Index (VPI)

Written By: Paramita Sarkar

Paramita Sarkar

Story-telling has been one of my favourite passtimes and when it is about travel, every other activity seems to fall short. I started my journey as a freelancer close to two decades ago having worked with various online portals inclduding Sambhar Stories, Thirllophilia and so on. Down the years, life has rewarded me with experiences, only adding to my writing practice. Even though teaching has been my primary profession and passion, choosing the job of a travel journalist was not quite dilemmatic when selected by the esteemed editorial team of Travel And Tour World. Knowing and letting readers know about the quaint yet intriguing desintions across the globe through writing is something I always cherish and put in my best endeavour to.

See Full Bio

August 3, 2026 10:34 PM

Today, Manchester-based fintech Conferma launched the Virtual Card Performance Index (VPI) to remove payment friction for business travellers. Along with the sector’s first global benchmark report, the VPI aims to provide a formal standard for measuring hotel payment reliability.

Virtual cards are now the primary method for processing corporate travel payments. Centralizing corporate travel spend, reducing payment fraud, and eliminating the need for travel employees to carry a corporate credit card all contributed to their preference. However, even with the proliferation of virtual cards, the travel industry has lacked a data transparent way to measure the reliability of these digital payments when an employee arrives at a hotel.

Until now, the sector has primarily focused on whether a property merely accepts virtual cards. Yet, as industry veterans note, acceptance on paper does not guarantee a frictionless check-in experience. When a virtual payment fails or is mishandled at the property level, the travelling employee is the first to feel the impact—often left waiting at the front desk or forced to use a personal card. Meanwhile, travel agents and corporate buyers are left to absorb the administrative fallout and subsequent reconciliation headaches.

The VPI addresses this operational blind spot by moving the market beyond mere acceptance, introducing a measurable view of how virtual card payments perform in practice. Built entirely on real transaction data rather than subjective surveys or stated corporate policies, the Index assigns every eligible hotel a score from 1 to 10, with 10 representing best-in-class performance.

According to Conferma, the score combines two critical measures of operational efficiency. The first is “payment delivery performance”, which evaluates how reliably the virtual card payment details are delivered to and subsequently handled by the hotel. The second metric is “payment completion consistency”, which tracks how consistently those initiated payments are successfully completed without manual intervention or error.

To ensure the data remains robust and actionable, scores are calculated at the individual property level, with parent-group and chain views layered on top for broader corporate analysis. Furthermore, the index is dynamically updated using a monthly rolling window to reflect ongoing performance and operational improvements over time. To qualify for a VPI score, a property must process a minimum of five virtual card transactions within the given evaluation window.

Industry Adoption from Day One

Signalling the acute need for such a metric, leading global Travel Management Companies (TMCs) including BCD Travel, Clarity, and CTM have adopted the VPI from its launch. These early adopters are already embedding the payment performance data directly into their sourcing, booking, and servicing workflows, fundamentally altering how hotels are evaluated during the corporate request for proposal (RFP) season.

As early adopters, these partners are helping to bring real-world application to the Index, ensuring it accurately reflects the day-to-day operational challenges faced across global travel programmes.

Neil Fyfe, Vice President of Payment and Expense Solutions at BCD, highlighted the progression this new metric represents for the sector. “As an early adopter of Conferma’s virtual card innovations, BCD is excited to bring customers the next evolution with VPI,” Fyfe said. “We’ve learned and improved from the initial launch of the Virtual Card Acceptance Rating last year, and the industry’s understanding of virtual card payments has evolved considerably in recent years as well. With VPI, we now have a shared benchmark to help the industry measure and improve payment experiences at scale.”

For TMCs, the ability to view a hotel’s historical payment reliability before booking is a crucial commercial lever. Pat McDonagh, Chief Executive Officer at Clarity, echoed this sentiment, stating: “This is the first time the industry has had a shared benchmark for payment performance. That changes how we evaluate suppliers, and how we deliver value to corporate travel programmes.”

The impact on the end-user—the business traveller—remains the central focus of the initiative. “Payment reliability directly affects traveler confidence, service efficiency, and the overall performance of a travel program,” explained Ken Augustine, Regional Head of Technology, North America at CTM. “The VPI gives us objective data to identify friction before it becomes an escalation, make more informed hotel sourcing decisions and help our customers build more consistent, efficient programs.”

Bridging the Gap Between Acceptance and Execution

Alongside the index, Conferma’s newly released VPI benchmark report provides the first aggregated, macro-level view of virtual card performance across the global hotel sector. The report highlights strong performers and exposes the significant variability that currently exists across the market, explicitly identifying the gap between a hotel’s stated ability to accept virtual cards and its capacity to execute those transactions reliably.

Mark Ledsham, Chief Executive Officer at Conferma, noted that the industry’s historical metrics have been insufficient for modern travel demands. “The industry has focused on acceptance. But acceptance doesn’t equal performance,” Ledsham said. “Visibility is the key to unlocking the real impact of reliable payments – and Conferma’s VPI gives the industry a clear, objective benchmark.”

The VPI enables performance payment data to be consolidated for corporate travel buyers, TMCs, and hotel groups and makes indeterminate payment issues a thing of the past. With this new data, the goal of providing a seamless travel experience is attainable. Conferma aims to minimize front-desk friction and drive real service dependability to optimize supplier decisions and outcomes of the travel programs.

Conferma’s leadership in virtual payments integrates the technology of virtual cards for secure transactions from a wide range of suppliers for Banks, TMCs, and global enterprises. The VPI streamlines the virtual payment issued card process for corporate travellers and is a significant advancement in the simplifying corporate travel finance process.