Conferma ditches fax in 100+ markets as virtual card era matures
Conferma, the Manchester-based virtual card infrastructure provider, has completed a mass retirement of fax-based payment delivery across more than 100 additional countries and territories, pushing the share of digital payment communications on its network to approximately 95%. The United States remains the sole major market still to complete the switch, with a targeted completion date of December 2026.
The milestone caps a multi-year rollout the company calls its "Ditch the Fax" programme, which has sequentially decommissioned fax delivery across Asia-Pacific, Europe, Canada, Central America, the Caribbean, and now Africa, the Middle East and South America. Hotels in those markets now receive virtual card payment details via secure email, digital vaults, or direct API connections into their property management systems (PMS).
From analogue friction to digital infrastructure
The operational stakes are modest but meaningful at scale. Fax transmissions can fail silently, forcing hotel front-desk teams and travel management companies (TMCs) to re-enter payment data manually and chase confirmations before a guest arrives. Conferma says early data from the first regions to retire fax shows virtual card payment completion rates running roughly 2 percentage points higher than at the start of 2026, a figure the company attributes to fewer failed deliveries and reduced manual handling.
Stuart Davenport, Chief Product Officer at Conferma, framed the change in operational rather than purely technological terms: "This transition is not simply about changing a communication channel. It is about removing a manual failure point between the booking, the payment, and the traveller arriving at the hotel."
The company measures payment-workflow maturity through its Virtual Card Performance Index, a benchmarking tool it positions as an industry standard for hotel payment performance. Hotels that have adopted digital delivery and kept their communication preferences current consistently score higher on that index, creating an incentive structure that nudges properties towards the newer channels without mandating them.
The wider convergence picture
For a cross-sector investor, the real signal here is less about fax and more about the infrastructure layer underpinning corporate travel payments. Virtual card adoption has expanded steadily across managed travel as card programmes have become a mechanism not just for payment but for spend control, reconciliation automation and supplier compliance. As Conferma connects directly into hotel PMS via API, it is effectively embedding fintech rail into hospitality operations, a convergence that mirrors what point-of-sale financing and embedded insurance have done in retail and e-commerce.
The geography of this rollout also carries a macro dimension. The latest phase covers the Middle East and Africa, two regions attracting significant sovereign and institutional capital into hospitality infrastructure. Gulf states in particular have announced ambitious hotel-bed expansion targets tied to tourism strategies such as Saudi Vision 2030 and Dubai's post-Expo development pipeline. As that physical capacity comes online, the payment rails serving it will matter increasingly to corporate travel programmes and their banking partners. A frictionless, fully digital virtual card delivery layer is, in that context, a prerequisite for scale rather than a technical nicety.
The outstanding question is the US, a market notable for its resilience of legacy systems. American hospitality has historically lagged European peers in PMS modernisation, and fax usage in hotel payment workflows has persisted longer there than in comparable markets. Conferma's ability to complete its programme by end-2026 will serve as a useful stress test of how quickly the US hotel sector can absorb infrastructure change when a global operator sets a hard deadline.