Roam makes travel payments simple and transparent for everyone

Roam is a payments platform that simplifies global payments and foreign exchange exposure for travel companies and travellers. It operates across 57 global markets from its headquarters in South Africa.

Cross-border payments and foreign exchange risks make travelling more complicated for everyone.

Roam’s mission is to reduce friction for the travel industry, helping an underserved market to manage cross-border payments and mitigate foreign exchange (FX) risks by offering its services as a merchant of record and micro hedging platform. This involves managing thousands of FX contracts every year so travellers booking through Roam see a fixed price for their holiday in their home currency which can be paid through multiple different channels.

That may sound simple, but it’s incredibly complicated to achieve, and unsurprisingly, Roam quickly outgrew its approach of using spreadsheets to track data and make calculations. To scale its business without increasing headcount, it needed a central platform to connect multiple data sources and automate workflows. And it wanted a platform it could build in-house without recruiting new developers.

Building a central ecosystem for growth.

Roam uses Salesforce Platform as the backbone of its entire technology stack. The small in-house team relies on flows, low-code automation, and built-in security to create a platform that does everything from processing payments and managing risk to CRM and providing customer communities. Roam can scale seamlessly and iterate quickly – it uses AB testing to perfect new features before releasing them. When the company needs to scale into new markets, it can replicate what it’s already built in Salesforce and tailor it to meet unique needs.

The Salesforce ecosystem is integrated with seven third-party systems including travel platforms, banking partners, and payment processors. Roam uses custom objects and logic to manage transactions, and real-time FX data is pulled into the system via APIs. Roam’s team works directly in Salesforce to execute direct trades, while travel companies and travellers log into Community Cloud to make bookings and track payment schedules.

Delivering secure payment management at scale with a 100% success rate.

Roam’s platform delivers compliant, transparent, and accurate payment processing at scale. In one year, it processed 4,400 payments with a 100% success rate. Under Roam’s business model, it takes ownership of products that travel companies offer to their customers, and therefore absorbs any risks associated with fluctuating exchange rates.

Travellers can compare pricing in their home currency and checkout in a travel branded gateway, choosing from a range of payment methods and whether to pay in full or instalments. Meanwhile, the travel company has full visibility of all bookings, payment schedules, and transactions from its own personalised dashboards in a dedicated community.

Protecting customers from FX risks and fraud with real-time data.

FX is a big risk for travel companies and travellers alike – when budgeting for their trip, travellers need to navigate foreign currencies and be aware that prices quoted may vary from the final sum they have to pay. Unless, of course, they’ve booked through Roam.

Roam mitigates risks by micro-hedging. Its custom platform ingests live data on exchange rates and runs exposure schedules, notifying the team when they need to act on a potential risk. That means customers only pay the amount they were quoted, even if the exchange rate changes between their first and last instalment.

The system also monitors for fraud via integrations with payment gateways and credit card processors. It automatically links payment attempts to customer records, and custom logic assesses for risk. If it detects an anomaly, it triggers a workflow to investigate it.

Automating processes with 88 custom flows.

Roam has experienced extraordinary growth. In just a few years, it served 26,000 travellers, processed R3.4 billion in trading, and mitigated R630 million in FX exposure across nearly 3,000 contracts. With a team of less than 20, this scale is possible thanks to 88 automated flows managing internal and external processes, from customer onboarding to real-time FX execution.

One example is the booking journey. When a traveller books a holiday with a travel company using Roam’s platform, they’re sent a link to log into a community and manage the booking. Payments are automatically authenticated, and if a traveller is paying in instalments, they’re sent on a payment journey with reminders when their next payment is due. It’s proactive, personalised, and far superior to the typical payment gateway experience. Flows like this contribute to a time saving equivalent to one full-time employee per year for travel companies.

Ramping up company growth with better lead management.

With growth on the agenda, Roam is using Salesforce CRM to capture and manage leads through the sales funnel. From website enquiries to opportunities from trade shows, leads are nurtured in Sales Cloud. With long lead times, trust, transparency, and swift responses are key to converting more leads.

Roam uses a custom flow to qualify leads. This involves capturing data on where the travel company is based, what type of holidays they provide and at what volume, and which payment methods and currencies they use. This triggers calculations to create financial estimates that help prioritise the hottest leads.

As the lead progresses through the funnel, Roam stays in touch via a marketing journey that will be powered by Marketing Cloud in the future.

Tracking metrics to support strategic decision-making.

Roam loves data, and it uses Salesforce dashboards to monitor key metrics such as demand for different currencies and payment types. This helps to make decisions around which new currencies to roll out. The company also uses KPIs to identify and eliminate friction. For example, if booking lead times are longer than average, it can look at why and work on resolving the issue.

Customer dashboards also help travel companies to get a better view of their business. They can see a breakdown of their source markets and make sure payments are going through smoothly. If they notice high rates of payment failures in one jurisdiction, for example, they can evaluate their fraud rules to make sure they’re not blocking legitimate payments.

Increasing loyalty by using customer feedback to design new features.

To truly serve travel companies, Roam needs to understand their pain points. Rather than relying on anecdotal evidence or guesswork, the team uses Salesforce data and customer feedback to find out what customers want next.

The most common requests are around payment efficiency. For example, a B2B travel agency with high volumes of transactions requested batch processing so they could settle multiple payments in one go.

Roam designed and launched a new feature in Salesforce that allows them to select multiple invoices, batch them, and pay in one click. When the payment is received, an automated flow checks the amount and reconciles it against individual invoices. This is a massive time saver for the customer and means they can make one weekly payment instead of multiple smaller payments. It also reduces the risk of manual errors and speeds up accounts receivable.

Faster payments benefit all parties, and because it works so well for the customer, platform adoption is higher.

This level of agility helps Roam build and reward loyalty with its most active customers, which is part of its growth strategy.

Prepare for the Agentforce advantage.

To increase growth without increasing headcount, Roam plans to use Agentforce to adapt and scale its processes to new regions without putting efficiency at risk. The team identified three potential use cases.

In a customer-facing role, Agentforce could proactively interact with travellers to help them manage their bookings and payments. Connecting with them at the most relevant touchpoints will increase trust and transparency while helping travellers to get the most from Roam’s platform.

Behind the scenes, plans for Agentforce are around efficiency and risk management.

Roam already monitors systems to identify areas for improvement, and using an agent would take this to the next level, highlighting where employees should focus each day to have the biggest impact.

Agentforce could also help manage FX exposure at scale, analysing huge amounts of data faster than humanly possible and pinpointing where staff need to act.

Roam’s Salesforce ecosystem allows it to simplify and automate complex processes. It connects data and multiple third-party systems and provides end-to-end visibility of all operations. Low-code tools, such as flows, mean that Roam can develop the platform in-house without specialist skills and iterate quickly in line with changing demands. Roam’s expertise lies in the travel industry, and by putting development in the hands of people with real-world experience in this area, it can better serve the sector and refine its competitive edge.