CellPoint, a payments technology provider for the airline and hospitality sectors, has appointed a new leadership team and secured $34m from Toscafund to launch Zenith, an AI decisioning platform built to sharpen payment performance across both industries.
Penta Capital, the private equity affiliate managing the Toscafund investment, has named Kevin Murphy as group CEO and Michael Kelly as chairman.
The pair have been tasked with reshaping CellPoint and building an AI-led payments platform focused on airlines and hospitality, two sectors in which payment performance has a direct bearing on margin, revenue and operational resilience.
Zenith operates as an AI decisioning layer that sits above any payment orchestrator, whether CellPoint’s own system or a third-party provider’s, converting payment data into automated commercial decisions. Because it works alongside existing infrastructure, airlines and hotels can deploy Zenith without needing to replace their current payment stack.
CellPoint positions itself as a specialist in payments for the airline and hospitality industries, drawing on its existing data, customer base and payments technology built specifically for these markets.
The Toscafund investment will also fund 50 new positions across product, data, AI, sales and partnerships teams in Europe, the Americas and Asia, alongside a strengthened executive line-up. Patrick Uckermark has joined as chief product and technology officer, taking charge of the company’s AI and data roadmap.
CellPoint group CEO Kevin Murphy said, “Payments are one of the largest controllable cost and revenue lines in an airline or hotel P&L, and one of the least well managed. Our job is to change that. Zenith uses AI to raise approval rates, cut cost of payments, recover lost revenue and give CFOs a live view of what their payment stack is actually doing. The $34m investment lets us build it at pace.”
Murphy added, “CellPoint has the data, the customers and the technology to lead this category, we have been given a clear mandate : focus the company, invest in AI, and deliver measurable financial impact for our airline and hospitality customers. Zenith is how we do it.”
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