Travel Ledger, a leading distributed billing and settlement platform for the travel industry, faced a persistent challenge in enabling frictionless, low-cost payments between agents and suppliers, while ensuring that all parties remained protected against default or insolvency. In a landscape marked by increasing regulatory scrutiny and growing insolvency risks, Travel Ledger sought a partner capable of embedding financial protection directly into their platform.
TMU Management, a specialist managing general agent (MGA) partnered with Travel Ledger to deliver an innovative Travel Distribution Insurance that safeguards funds throughout the payment journey. By integrating TMU's insurance-backed protection into the Travel Ledger ecosystem, agents and suppliers can now transact with greater confidence, knowing that their settlements are both trusted and protected. The collaboration has enhanced Travel Ledger's core proposition, enabling the platform to expand its role from a transaction ledger to a fully insured payments network. The initiative has strengthened industry trust, improved liquidity and aligned the platform with emerging regulatory and risk management expectations across the UK and EU travel markets.
Travel Ledger is a London-based fintech platform revolutionising how the travel industry manages billing and settlement between agents, suppliers and intermediaries. By replacing traditional paper invoicing and manual reconciliation with distributed ledger technology (DLT), Travel Ledger automates B2B settlements with transparency, speed and traceability. The company works with leading travel technology partners, consortia and suppliers to streamline back-office operations, providing a secure, digital environment where every transaction is verified and accounted for.
Travel Ledger's mission is to simplify financial operations for the global travel ecosystem—reducing costs, eliminating errors and improving cash flow visibility. In an industry where trust is fundamental, Travel Ledger continues to lead the adoption of modern settlement infrastructure designed for both efficiency and security.
For decades, the travel industry's B2B settlement process has been fragmented, opaque and dependent on intermediaries. Traditional payment rails—credit cards, manual bank transfers or trust account structures—often introduce friction, delay and cost. More critically, suppliers have limited visibility over payment security, while agents face restrictive credit terms designed to offset the perceived insolvency risk within the sector. As insolvency events among travel companies rose following the pandemic, risk appetite among suppliers tightened. Many demanded upfront payments or additional security, eroding liquidity and constraining growth across the supply chain.
Travel Ledger's distributed ledger platform solved many operational inefficiencies, but lacked a built-in mechanism to protect funds in transit. Without a guarantee of settlement security, suppliers were hesitant to fully leverage the digital ledger's automated clearing capabilities. Previous attempts to address this gap relied on traditional bonding or trust account arrangements—solutions that were expensive, inflexible and geographically fragmented. Travel Ledger needed a scalable, embedded insurance solution that could secure settlements across multiple currencies and jurisdictions without reintroducing friction.
TMU Management collaborated with Travel Ledger to embed its Travel Distribution Insurance directly into the Travel Ledger platform. The solution combines digital settlement efficiency with insurance-grade financial protection, creating a trusted payment layer for agents and suppliers. Through TMU's underwriting expertise in financial failure insurance (FFI) and acquirer chargeback cover (ACC), the insurance ensures that supplier payments facilitated via Travel Ledger are backed by a regulated insurance structure. This protects suppliers from non-payment due to agent insolvency, while also giving agents the ability to trade under standardised, transparent risk terms.
The partnership established a unified "Protected Payments" framework:
This initiative marked a significant evolution in the way travel funds are transacted, bridging the gap between financial technology and regulated insurance to build the first truly trusted and insured B2B payment network in travel.
The implementation unfolded in a structured series of collaborative sprints between Travel Ledger's technology team and TMU's underwriting and compliance teams. Initial phases focused on designing data-sharing protocols and settlement logic within Travel Ledger's DLT framework to align with TMU's underwriting criteria.
Subsequent integration steps included:
Both teams maintained close coordination through technical workshops and joint compliance reviews. Challenges included harmonising data standards across multiple partners and ensuring that the insurance layer added protection without slowing settlement speed. The final system achieved full interoperability, delivering both automation and assurance in a single integrated workflow.
The partnership has redefined what "trusted payment" means in travel. Since deployment, participating suppliers have reported increased willingness to extend credit terms to insured agents, enabling smoother trading and faster reconciliation. Agents, in turn, benefit from reduced collateral requirements and improved working capital efficiency.
Travel Ledger's adoption rates among key consortia and supplier networks have accelerated, with users citing "confidence in settlement security" as a top driver of engagement. The platform's credibility has grown, positioning it not only as a technology provider but as a risk-managed payments hub.
From a macro perspective, the solution has demonstrated how embedded insurance can de-risk complex B2B ecosystems. By blending DLT transparency with regulated financial protection, TMU and Travel Ledger have jointly created a replicable model for other high-risk verticals seeking to modernise their payment infrastructure without compromising security.
"Working with TMU Management allowed us to take Travel Ledger's proposition to the next level. By embedding their travel distribution insurance, we've been able to combine automation with assurance—giving our users the confidence that every transaction is secure. This collaboration has strengthened trust across our network and demonstrated the real-world potential of insured digital settlements."
The collaboration between TMU Management and Travel Ledger highlights the growing convergence of fintech and insurtech. The success of this initiative underscores the value of embedding regulated insurance within transactional infrastructure—not as an add-on, but as a core function of trust. Key lessons include the importance of aligning data transparency with underwriting insight, ensuring that automation does not compromise compliance, and designing insurance that scales across multiple counterparties and jurisdictions.
As the partnership evolves, TMU and Travel Ledger plan to extend this framework to support new forms of trade credit, escrow and account-to-account settlement models. The project validates that trusted digital payments in travel are achievable when innovation is anchored in both technology and insurance discipline.
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