Travel payments glossary

Compliance

The set of legal, regulatory and scheme rules a payment process has to follow.

Plain-English definition

Compliance in payments is the set of legal, regulatory and scheme rules that apply to how a business takes, processes, refunds and reports payments. Travel-specific examples include PCI DSS for card data, PSD2 and SCA for strong customer authentication, ATOL and APC for trust and protection, AML and KYC requirements on certain flows, and consumer-protection rules around refunds and right of withdrawal. Compliance is continuous — what worked last year may not be enough this year.

Why it matters in travel

Travel finance teams sit at the intersection of payments compliance and travel-industry compliance: card-data security, money-protection regimes, escrow rules and consumer-rights laws all touch the same booking record. Evidence is the common currency of every compliance regime.

Compliance in travel is layered in a way most sectors do not match. The same booking can be in scope for PCI DSS, PSD2, ATOL Trust, ABTA, package travel regulations and the consumer-protection framework of the destination market. Each regime asks slightly different questions of the same evidence, and the cost of providing it scales with the gaps between systems.

The travel businesses that manage compliance well keep the evidence attached to the booking from the moment money first changes hands, so any regime can read what it needs without a custom export. The businesses that store evidence in silos pay for the gaps in audit, reporting and regulator interactions year after year.

How felloh helps

felloh keeps compliance evidence — authentication, settlement, protected funds, refund history — attached to the booking, so the trail is ready when a regulator, scheme, auditor or customer asks for it.

Connect the dots.

See how payments, settlement, refunds and reporting evidence connect around every booking.