Katanox today announced the launch of Katanox Capital, its settlement and liquidity infrastructure purpose-built for the hospitality industry, addressing long-standing inefficiencies in how hotels, travel agents, and corporate buyers move money.

The need for a new model

For decades, the hospitality sector has operated with a structural mismatch between when commercial value is created and when funds are actually received. 

Hotels deliver inventory, absorb operational risk, and operate on narrow margins, yet are often paid late, unpredictably, and at high cost. 

Travel agents and corporate buyers, meanwhile, are required to pre-finance bookings, tying up liquidity well in advance of revenue realization.

Legacy B2B payment systems, largely built on consumer card infrastructure, were never designed to support the economic realities of hospitality, where bookings, cancellation policies, revenue recognition, invoicing, and settlement timing are tightly linked. 

As a result, payment fragmentation slows reconciliation, increases manual workload, obscures financial visibility, and erodes margins. Industry research shows that 66% of travel companies report that outdated payment systems are affecting profitability, and nearly 90% prioritize upgrades to financial operations.

A new approach

Katanox Capital is built on the premise that these challenges stem from a flawed foundation, not a lack of optimization. Rather than layering financing on top of legacy payment rails, Katanox re-engineers the infrastructure itself by unifyingthe flow of funds with the booking lifecycle.

Here’s an example of how Katanox Capital works:

1. Upon booking materialization, a payment guarantee to the hotel and a commission guarantee to the travel agent are triggered.

2. Katanox Capital advances the payment to the hotel and pays the commission to the travel agent in daily batches.

3. The travel agent settles all advanced transactions, including applicable fees, monthly via account-to-account payments.

By controlling transactions end-to-end — from distribution through payment orchestration and accounting — Katanox Capital derives liquidity from booking certainty. 

Once a booking reaches its financial trigger, such as a non-refundable reservation or guest check-in, settlement is guaranteed, and funds move automatically from account to account.

This unified approach realigns incentives across the ecosystem and addresses the root cause of payment inefficiencies: the historical separation between commerce systems and financial systems.

Clear benefits for hotels, travel agents, and corporate buyers

For hotels, Katanox Capital delivers timely, predictable payouts directly to bank accounts. Payments are settled in daily, non-reversible batches, eliminating long settlement delays and reducing reliance on layered card networks and intermediaries.

Travel agents and corporate buyers benefit by avoiding pre-funding bookings. Instead, they settle with Katanox on a consolidated monthly basis, with transparent reporting and predictable costs. 

Only guaranteed bookings count toward settlement exposure, freeing capital previously locked into speculative or flexible reservations.

This model reduces operational overhead and allows participants to reinvest capital into growth rather than liquidity management.

As global payments become more complex and booking volumes increase, the limitations of legacy systems are becoming harder to ignore.

Katanox Capital represents a shift from incremental optimization toward foundational redesign, positioning financial infrastructure as a strategic enabler rather than operational overhead.