S7 Airlines, a member of the oneworld® global aviation alliance, in partnership with Alfa-Bank, is developing its own innovative blockchain platform. In July, the volume of payments with our agents via the blockchain platform exceeded $1 million.
“Thanks to this new technology, now it’s easier for our agents to work directly with the airline, which allowed us to expand our own S7 Airlines sales network. Within this year, we are planning to deploy first online agents, whose work would comply with the NDC standard, on the platform,” Ekaterina Dmitruk, S7 Group Sales Director, said.
S7 Airlines sold the first air ticket in the world that was bought by connecting to a banking system through a blockchain in July 2017. The private blockchain was built on the Ethereum protocol base. This is the first project in which the infrastructure for making payments in a permanent mode was created — from the ticket booking system to the bank payment system. The introduction of the platform has increased the processing rate of payments and reduced the amount of paperwork, while ensuring the safety of operations at the same time.
“The number of operations is growing every month. Since January, the amount of payments made on the blockchain platform has grown tenfold. In addition to the number of transactions, the number of other processes that we try to automate on our platform is also growing. This was largely made possible by the Hyperledger Fabric platform, which not only provides stable network performance, but also allows us to safely and privately store data of different members,” Nikolai Mukhanov, S7 Techlab Executive Director, explained.
“The good results of our project with S7 Airlines shows that the blockchain technology creates value and is largely decisive for the B2B market. Agents left behind the guarantees and deposits, reduced transaction costs and now can make payments 24/7. We see great potential in the use of smart contracts and external business logic in accounting and paperwork in various sectors of the economy. Alfa-Bank will continue going in this direction with S7 Airlines,” Pavel Ryazanov, Director of Transaction Business at Alfa-Bank, said.
The holding’s specialists are actively coming up with solutions based on the blockchain technology. In August 2018, S7 Airlines was the first airline in Russia to refuel an aircraft using smart contracts based on the blockchain technology with the operator Gazpromneft-Aero and Alfa-Bank. The new technology allows to increase the processing rate of payments and minimize the financial risks of the parties of the transaction with no prepayment and bank guarantees required. The process of debiting funds and transferring reporting documents between the fuel supplier and the airline takes only 60 seconds.