White Paper · Envisso × Tiralis Global
Rolling reserves hold two months of volume. Airline exposure runs to six.
The Airline Acquirer Risk Report 2026, published with airline credit-risk specialists Tiralis Global, sizes what acquirers and PSPs are carrying on airline merchants, sets out what the last 35 airline failures had in common, and asks whether the collateral-led model is the right instrument for any of it.
A joint publication by
The exposure
$95-115bn
Card-paid forward-sold airline inventory in the global payment chain at any point in the seasonal cycle
The failures
35
Scheduled passenger airlines that stopped flying between 2019 and 2026, analysed in full
The mismatch
1-2 vs 2-6
Months of volume a rolling reserve holds, against months of forward-inventory exposure it defends
When it breaks
20-40%
Chargeback rate within weeks of a cessation, up from a baseline below 1%
Spirit ceased operations in May 2026, the latest in a run that includes Flybe, Go First, Silver Airways, Lynx Air, Bonza and PLAY. In publicly reported cases, the collateral and reserves in place were exceeded by what crystallised. Here is the argument in four parts.
Key Takeaway 1
The exposure is flights already paid for and not yet flown
Airlines break the pattern most card categories follow. A consumer pays today for a flight in 30, 60, 90 or 180 days, and the chargeback window does not begin to expire until the service is delivered, which opens a contingent-liability tail of up to 18 months on long-haul leisure. Refund regimes such as US DOT, UK ATOL and EU Regulation 261 make the obligation non-optional, so when the airline cannot pay, the issuer takes it on and the chargeback flows to the acquirer.
That liability is continuous rather than a tail risk, and it runs larger than most acquirers acknowledge. Globally, on IATA revenue figures, USD 95 to 115 billion of card-paid forward-sold airline inventory sits in the payment chain at any moment in the seasonal cycle, and first-quarter 2026 filings put it 11% higher year on year. After collateral and recovery, a single airline failure can leave one acquirer carrying anywhere from low tens of millions to several billion dollars.
Key Takeaway 2
What the last 35 airline failures had in common
Tiralis analysed 35 scheduled passenger airlines that failed between 2019 and 2026. Structural weakness drove 63% of them. Eight are taken apart in detail with the fundamentals as they stood at the last published accounts: every one had poor liquidity, and all but one were highly leveraged and carrying chronic losses. None was a black swan. Each was preceded by months of observable signals.
Public ratings will not surface any of it. The three main agencies rate just 34 airline entities, and they rate bond default risk rather than the service-delivery risk an acquirer carries, so most airline merchant relationships globally sit with carriers that are unrated or below investment grade. The markers themselves are well established: airlines that failed within 18 months had, in nearly every public case, dropped below 30 days of operating-cost cover in the preceding year, with cover below 15 days a red flag and operating margins below 3% marking elevated default probability. In other words, the signals were readable at the time. What acquirers lacked was not the analysis but the cadence to act on it, and that is still the gap today.
Key Takeaway 3
Collateral is sized to volume. The liability is not.
The industry answer to that risk has been collateral: cash holdback, rolling reserve, prepayment, typically 5 to 15% of monthly settled volume on higher-risk relationships. A rolling reserve at full accumulation reaches one to two months of settled volume, while forward-inventory contingent exposure is two to six months of it, depending on the booking-window mix. This is not a calibration problem that a higher percentage fixes, because the two numbers measure different things. One tracks what an airline processed last month. The other tracks what it has promised to fly and has not flown yet.
Collateral fails in three further ways. It makes failure more likely, because demands rise in periods of stress, exactly when the airline most needs the cash. It goes stale, because a schedule set in March is out of date by August, and the liability is almost a quarter larger at its June peak than at its December trough. And it tells the acquirer nothing about whether the airline is improving or deteriorating. Asking for more does not fix any of that: large carriers negotiate across several acquirers and walk when one demands too much, so the market settles at levels too low to cover the liability yet still high enough to drain the airline’s working capital.
Key Takeaway 4
What replaces collateral, and what that unlocks
The alternative is not simply insurance instead of collateral. It has three connected parts: continuous airline-specific scoring rather than annual review, embedded default-risk insurance sized to forward inventory rather than to monthly volume, and a pre-defined escalation pathway, because detection without escalation is academic. Collateral remains an appropriate tool for some risk categories, and forward-inventory airline exposure is what it is wrong for.
For the acquirer, cover is sized to the actual liability, loss volatility moves to an insurance balance sheet built to hold it, and continuous risk information replaces annual snapshots. For the airline, capital previously locked as collateral is freed for operations and underwriting compresses from weeks to days. The commercial effect is the part that tends to get missed: airlines previously rejected on collateral grounds become underwritable, which directly increases addressable volume, and acquirers who move first win relationships from competitors still pricing in collateral demands.
Read the full 36-page report
The report carries the four structural problems with collateral in full, the regional ratio benchmarks, the forward-sales and working-capital scatter analysis across 113 operators, the full taxonomy of the 35 failures, eight case studies with the fundamentals as they stood at the last published accounts, the airline credit-scoring methodology, and the 2026 action list in priority order.
The analysis draws on public data only and does not comment on the financial position of any specific airline currently operating.