Inside lastminute.com: scaling a global travel-tech platform
Join Revolut Business for an exclusive look at the financial mechanics behind one of Europe's leading travel-tech companies.
For a consumer, booking a dynamic holiday package is a seamless, one-click transaction. But on the back-end, that single click triggers a highly complex, fragmented web of payouts to a global network of 400 airlines and 3.3 million accommodation partners.
When you are operating at this massive scale across dozens of countries, cross-border payments become a significant operational hurdle. Relying on legacy banking setups means absorbing high FX conversion fees, excessive scheme margins, and administrative debt that eats directly into the unit profitability of every booking.
In this 45-minute masterclass, Diego Fiorentini, Chief Financial Officer at lastminute.com, will take us under the hood of how they completely modernised their B2B payment stack, shifting the finance function from an operational back-office into a strategic driver of margin.
We will discuss:
The Margin Threat at Scale: The anatomy of a dynamic holiday package, and how mismatched currencies and traditional card scheme margins create a massive FX leak.
Automating Supplier Payouts: An inside look at how lastminute.com uses the Revolut Business API to programmatically generate virtual cards at the exact moment of booking.
Smart Routing & 'Like-for-Like' Settlement: How generating virtual cards in the exact local currency of the supplier completely bypasses conversion costs and improves payment success rates.
The Financial ROI: How this API-driven infrastructure saves over €100,000 every month on FX costs (adding €1.2M a year back to the bottom line), while enabling faster, transparent month-end reconciliation.
The Competitive Advantage: How reinvesting backend operational savings allows for more aggressive, competitive pricing on the front-end to win market share.
Meet the Speaker
Diego Fiorentini is the Chief Financial Officer at lastminute.com, where he drives the financial discipline required to scale a global travel-tech operation. With over a decade of executive finance experience, Diego previously served as Group CFO of the cleantech company Cavotec Ltd—leading a successful IPO on the Nasdaq OMX—and held senior treasury roles at Italmobiliare SpA. He holds a degree in Business Administration and Corporate Finance from Bocconi University.
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