Alexandre Morin on Why Payments Are the Hardest Part of Scaling a Global Travel Platform

My next guest works at the intersection of two industries reshaping each other quickly — travel and payments. Alexandre Morin is the Director of Payments, Risk and Fintech at Wego, the number one travel app and largest online travel marketplace in the MENA region. He runs global payments strategy, partnerships, and innovation across the consumer and business sides of the platform. Alex, welcome to Wall Street to Mena. How are you today?
Good, thank you. Thank you for having me.
Alex, Wego operates across dozens of markets, each with its own currencies, local payment methods, and rules. When you are scaling payment operations globally, what is the hardest part of getting that right — and what breaks first when you grow fast?
I would say the picture has changed quite a bit in the last five years. Five years ago, the challenge was building an integration with a new payment provider. Providers would pitch you saying it could be done in three weeks, but the reality was closer to three months. Now there has been a lot of improvement in that area — through a single API you can access dozens of payment methods, and you also have mobile SDKs and secure fields. So integration is no longer the issue. The challenge now is what comes after. How do you present a unified performance view to your management across ten different providers and twenty different payment methods? How do you handle reconciliation? How do you address fraud patterns that look very different across those different payment methods? That all comes down to how you unify your data — and that is an internal task that every merchant accepting payments has to figure out for themselves.
When you are entering a new market, how do you decide which local payment methods are worth integrating?
We do market studies, we look at the competition, and then we look at the funnel — are we losing customers at the payment page or not? If we are, that is the alert that something needs to be done.
Running payments at this scale means managing a web of partners, processors, networks, banks, and fintechs. How do you decide whether to build something in-house versus partnering as you expand?
The framework is this — if something is heavy on regulation and licensing, I would rather partner. On the economic side, if the investment to build in-house would deliver a return within 12 months, then it makes sense to build. But given how many payment providers exist today, building your own integrations makes less and less sense over time.
Looking ahead, what does payments for travel in the MENA region look like in the next five years, and what is the piece most people are underestimating?
I am quite bullish on intelligent orchestration — leveraging AI to identify exactly what issue a customer is facing at the payment stage, avoiding unnecessary retries, and converting as much as possible without having to make every decision manually.
Alex, thank you so much for joining us.