The company uses AI agents to enhance supplier payments, compliance, and onboarding, whilst keeping the reins on financial decisions firmly in the client’s hands.
Sunrate won the AI Initiative of the Year - Singapore category at the Travel Daily Media Travel Trade Excellence Awards 2026 - Asia for Sunrate.AI, the agentic intelligence layer of Sunrate’s platform, designed to simplify global payments and treasury operations for travel businesses.
Sunrate.AI decreases manual work for travel finance teams handling supplier payments, foreign exchange (FX), compliance checks, and onboarding. The initiative blends automation with human supervision, allowing AI agents to validate information, evaluate choices, and execute tasks within client-defined approval controls.
Smart travel payments using AI agents
Travel companies often have to make large numbers of payments to suppliers, in a range of currencies, against strict booking and settlement deadlines. Complexity and slow processes can be introduced by manual processes for checking beneficiaries, selecting payment methods, reconciling transactions, and monitoring compliance requirements.
Sunrate.AI can help address these challenges through agents that assess situations and take action within defined boundaries.
The platform includes payment, FX, compliance, onboarding, and chat agents. The Payment Agent validates beneficiaries, suggests suitable payment channels, and supports bank transfers or virtual card payments within client approval controls. The FX Agent identifies potential funding gaps before settlement and recommends currency conversions.
Meanwhile, the Compliance Agent is used to support know-your-customer and know-your-business checks, sanctions and watchlist screening, adverse media reviews, and risk assessment. The Onboarding Agent, for its part, guides customers through registration and KYB/KYC preparation, checks submitted information against uploaded documents and supports identity verification. The Chat Agent then guides users contextually through the platform by means of natural-language queries.
The system is based on the payment infrastructure of Sunrate, including its virtual card capabilities as a principal member of Mastercard. Application programming interfaces can generate virtual cards for single bookings, each linked to a particular supplier, amount, validity period, and booking reference.
Crucially, the agents are built into Sunrate’s platform, so online travel agencies and travel management companies already using Sunrate can adopt them without a separate integration. Clients remain in control of financial decisions with human authorisation in the payment workflow.
Since deploying its AI agents, Sunrate has seen improvements across compliance, onboarding, and customer support. The system has helped to streamline compliance reviews, reduce the number of manual checks for low-risk cases, and shorten the time for preparing cases. Its onboarding features have also reduced the need for guidance and unnecessary document re-submissions, whilst facilitating better engagement post-onboarding.
Sunrate’s virtual card model also supports automated reconciliation, reduces buyers’ exposure to payment card industry data security requirements, and can help reduce FX costs through supplier-currency cards.
By combining AI-driven automation with structured payment infrastructure and human approval, Sunrate.AI offers travel businesses a way to streamline complex financial workflows without relinquishing control over their money.
The Travel Daily Media Travel Trade Excellence Awards - Asia stands as the premier awards programme in the Asia Pacific region, dedicated to recognising the pinnacle of excellence within the travel industry. This prestigious event honours the very best in hotels, airlines, airports, cruise lines, tour operators, travel agencies, booking platforms, and travel technology.
The Travel Daily Media Travel Trade Excellence Awards 2026 - Asia is presented by Travel Daily Media Magazine. To view the full list of winners, click here. For more information on the awards programme, you may contact Danica Avila at +65 3158 1386 or [email protected].
