France-based hotel booking platform CDS Groupe has appointed Christopher Hecht as vice president, payment solutions.
Hecht has 15 years’ experience in B2B payments and hotel distribution, and joins the company from rival HRS where he most recently served as the chief product officer of HRS Pay.
Based in Germany, Hecht has a long history with HRS, first joining the accommodation platform in 2010 and working his way up to head of payment solutions, before joining travel invoice management provider Itelya in 2017 (which was later acquired by HRS) and then founding spend management platform Paypense in 2020, which was also acquired by HRS.
In his new role at CDS, Hecht will consolidate the group’s various payment solutions with a goal to expand into new travel categories by harnessed automation and “intelligent” payment workflows.
CDS has recently expanded across Europe following a series of acquisitions – including that of Germany-based hotel specialist Corporate Rates Club in 2023 and Italian ERP provider SIAP in late 2024.
“My mission is to unify four distinct payment solutions into a single, data-powered and machine-learning-enhanced model, and extend it beyond hotels to include air, rail and other corporate travel categories,” Hecht said in a statement.
CDS Groupe CEO Ziad Minkara added: “Booking, payment, invoicing: a single dynamic. With Christopher Hecht, we are unifying these flows.”