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Marketplaces and Platforms

Marketplaces and platforms enable commerce, by connecting remote buyers and sellers. By embedding payment acceptance in their solutions, they make it easy for businesses to accept payments from their customers, often across a wide range of payment methods. These capabilities can come in different flavors: end user visibility, digital wallet capabilities, additional payments adjacent features, and multiple settlement and disbursement options are variations to consider. The three major capabilities that these solutions have to solve for are:

1. Onboarding (which includes regulatory compliance considerations)

2. Payment Acceptance

3. Payouts to End Users

These three components may be built in house, provided by a single solution, or pieced together with point solutions. How these components are architected has implications for state, country, and regional licensing as well as the operational overhead to manage the payments environment.

Platforms and marketplaces also have to manage multiple types of risk compared to a traditional merchant, which requires decisions about risk sharing, fraud vendors, operational structure (in-source vs outsource) and how a risk control strategy should be developed.

This enabler role offers opportunities and challenges. To perform it well, marketplaces and platforms often come to us with questions like:

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How do we respond to upcoming or newly implemented regulatory changes?

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What strategic payments plays are our competitors doing?

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What role are we obligated to play in fraud and risk management? What role should we play?

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What could we do to make payments a source of revenue?

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Are we working with the right partners? Do we have the right contracts in place?

How we can help

We provide strategic and operational guidance by conducting:
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Assessments

of current operations, of partner performance, of market opportunities, and of regulatory environments

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Research

qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method research and analysis

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Strategic advisory

short- and long-term advisory
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Education

on payments foundations, trends, and company strategy working sessions
Take a look at how we’ve provided vendor agnostic, objective guidance to other marketplaces and platforms.

Marketplace & Platforms Case Studies

A large ecommerce platform optimizes its payments strategy

A large ecommerce platform supporting small to medium businesses had grown significantly over the last decade. The company was concerned they had ‘outgrown’ their approach to payments. Glenbrook was asked to help assess the company’s payments strategies, operations, partners, and organization in order to define a more ideal configuration for payments acceptance, reporting, and ongoing management.

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A global marketplace enhances and tunes an automated fraud screening system

To create a more robust risk mitigation program, a multi-national marketplace engaged Glenbrook to assess its risk environment and existing controls to identify areas for potential improvement. We then led a comprehensive RFP process for online fraud detection and KYC providers. The final deliverable was an actionable set of recommendations to improve their operational and technical control capabilities to enable them to scale their business.

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Resources

Articles

Glenbrook shares our perspectives on activities in the industry.

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Podcasts

Glenbrook speaks with industry leaders to share a variety of perspectives on the latest payments trends and activities.

Episode 288 – The First 25 Years of Glenbrook – Fanning the Flames with our Founders

For Glenbrook’s 25th Anniversary, we speak with the three founding partners – Carol Coye Benson, Scott Loftesness, and Allen Weinberg – to celebrate the progress of the industry and the firm.

Listen in as they recall the early days of the firm, discuss how Glenbrook’s strategy work expanded to form our education and global practices, consider the evolution of the “payments professional”, and reflect on payments industry shifts over their years both in and out of Glenbrook.

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Episode 286 – Understanding Trust in the Modern Agentic and Digital Economy, with Jenny Hadlow and Rory O’Neill, Checkout.com

In this episode, Chris Uriarte welcomes Jenny Hadlow, COO, and Rory O’Neill, CMO, from Checkout.com to discuss the findings from their recent report “Trust in the Digital Economy 2025” and explore the interesting dimensions of trust that merchants, consumers, and service providers need to be aware of in today’s ever changing digital (and agentic) economy.

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News

Glenbrook objectively curates the news to keep you abreast of important daily headlines in payments.

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Ready to see how Glenbrook can support your marketplaces and platform company to be as efficient and effective as possible?

Reach out to us today