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 304 – Fanning the Flames: Meta Muse, Instinct, and the Current State of Agentic Commerce
Glenbrook’s Chris Uriarte and Drew Edmond revisit the state of agentic commerce, exploring emerging consumer interfaces like Instinct and Meta Muse, access to merchant catalogs and data, and the challenges of turning agent-driven shopping into actual transactions. They also share their firsthand experiences making an agentic purchase through Meta Muse, and the industry complexities that still need addressed.
Episode 303 – Fanning the Flames: Every Payment, Every Environment, All at Once
This episode is a follow up to Drew Edmond’s 2025 payments performance optimization series, and an accumulation of what he has learned about how optimization actually works today. And here’s the short version – for subscription payments and for subscription businesses, an individual transaction success depends on a lot more than just the payment.
Tune in as Drew outlines a data-forward approach that spans every environment a payment touches, highlighted by clips from previous guests from the payments performance optimization series.
Episode 302 – Catching Up on the Capital Markets, with Timothy Chiodo, UBS
About a year ago, we chatted with with Tim Chiodo of UBS and Chris Kim of Capital Group about the investment side of payments. It’s been a pretty volatile 12-months in the equity market since then – well-timed for Bryan Derman to welcome Tim back on the podcast and catch up on the market factors playing into the payments space.
Listen in as they recap the performance of payments stocks, dive into the e-commerce market, provide perspective on the card networks, discuss merchant acquiring growth opportunities, and finish up with a lightning round on emerging technology.
News
Glenbrook objectively curates the news to keep you abreast of important daily headlines in payments.
Google Unveils ‘Universal’ Cart, Turns Web Into Marketplace
"Google has begun rolling out "Universal Cart" Thursday in time for the holidays after providing details at its annual Google I/O developer conference in May.The agentic commerce and checkout tool is built on Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), co-developed...
J.P. Morgan Payments Powers Mercado Libre’s Global Selling Expansion
"J.P. Morgan Payments is supporting leading Latin America e-commerce marketplace’s Global Selling program, which enables U.S. businesses to sell across Latin America. Mercado Libre is leveraging Embedded Payments from J.P. Morgan Payments for its U.S. sellers. The...
Introducing Agent Vault: A Single, Portable Solution to Prevent Your Agents From Going Rogue with Credit Cards and Login Credentials, Built by Self Labs
"AI assistants and agents are finally capable of real work and day-to-day tasks, with new solutions enabling agentic credit card payments for humans. But until today, there was no solution that kept credentials out of an agent’s context, preventing theft and...
Ready to see how Glenbrook can support your marketplaces and platform company to be as efficient and effective as possible?