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
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:
How do we respond to upcoming or newly implemented regulatory changes?
What strategic payments plays are our competitors doing?
What role are we obligated to play in fraud and risk management? What role should we play?
What could we do to make payments a source of revenue?
Are we working with the right partners? Do we have the right contracts in place?
How we can help
Assessments
of current operations, of partner performance, of market opportunities, and of regulatory environments
Research
qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method research and analysis
Strategic advisory
Education
Marketplace & Platforms Case Studies
Resources
Articles
Glenbrook shares our perspectives on activities in the industry.
Mid-Year Payments Check-In: Revisiting Our 2026 Predictions
The Glenbrook team is taking stock in June 2026 to see how the payments trends predictions from our January Payments on Fire episode are holding up.
The Missing Context Layer in Agentic Commerce: Part 3
Glenbrook’s Drew Edmond explores the specific implications for the payments and agentic commerce industry: how discovery changes when agents mediate it, how payment selection shifts upstream, how merchants need to prepare differently across categories, and who ultimately controls the agent layer.
The Missing Context Layer in Agentic Commerce: Part 2
Glenbrook’s Drew Edmond examines why the agent’s role in agentic commerce varies significantly by purchase category, where the context layer is being built today, and how far along it actually is.
Podcasts
Glenbrook speaks with industry leaders to share a variety of perspectives on the latest payments trends and activities.
Episode 298 – The Patchwork of Payments Regulation in the US, with Duncan Douglass, Alston & Bird LLP
Kicking off a series of regulation-related episodes, Duncan Douglass, payments attorney and Partner at Alston & Bird LLP, joins Chris Uriarte and Samantha Gordon to turn the confusing and sometimes tedious topic of US payments regulation into an entertaining and enlightening update.
The conversation begins with who actually regulates payments in the US and how US payments oversight differs from the UK and EU, then flows into developments on current regulatory topics.
Episode 297 – A New Era for Card Issuing, with Nikil Konduru, Lithic
Drew Edmond and Chris Uriarte chat with Nikhil Konduru, Chief Commercial Officer at Lithic, to discuss modern card issuing infrastructure and where the market is headed. Tune in as they break down the issuing stack, discuss issuer-side tools to improve authorization outcomes, and explore implications for cross-border payments and agentic commerce.
Episode 296 – Fanning the Flames – Beyond Borders: Navigating Your Global Payments Strategy
Going global with your payments strategy requires far more than choosing a single payment provider: companies must weigh local acquiring versus cross-border acquiring, country-by-country payment preferences, entity structure, tax implications, compliance requirements, authorization performance, currency handling, and provider coverage.
In this episode, Chris Uriarte joins Glenbrook colleagues Samantha Gordon, Simon Skinner, and Drew Edmond to explore the complexities and potential benefits for merchants and platforms to consider when expanding payments globally.
News
Glenbrook objectively curates the news to keep you abreast of important daily headlines in payments.
Financial Services Intelligence Report July 2026
"The great unbundling of the banking and financial services industry may have reached a turning point. After several quarters of losing share of new account openings to FinTech challenger brands, the big banks have come roaring back in the second quarter of 2026....
How Do We Regulate Payments When It’s AI Agents Spending the Money?
"AI agents are moving from giving advice to taking action – for payments, the consequences are immediate and can be difficult to reverse. Financial institutions have long built trust around knowing who is behind a transaction; agentic AI adds a layer between the human...
With Swift, RBC and TD, a New Era for International Money Transfers Arrives in Canada
"People in Canada receiving money from family, friends or businesses abroad will get a significantly better experience as Canadian financial institutions go live with a new consumer payments initiative from Swift. The initiative sets a new standard for international...
Ready to see how Glenbrook can support your marketplaces and platform company to be as efficient and effective as possible?