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.
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.
The Missing Context Layer in Agentic Commerce: Part 1
Glenbrook’s Drew Edmond discusses the critical role of a persistent, cross-application context layer, ideally provided at the operating system level, in enabling the envisioned future of agentic commerce where AI agents can proactively and intelligently assist consumers in transactions.
Podcasts
Glenbrook speaks with industry leaders to share a variety of perspectives on the latest payments trends and activities.
Episode 294 – Zelle’s Evolution in the Payments Landscape, with Preston McCaskill, Early Warning Services
In this episode, Russ Jones welcomes Preston McCaskill, COO for Zelle, an open loop fast payments network owned and operated by Early Warning Services, to discuss the network’s growth, settlement process and alias directory, and expanding use cases.
Episode 293 – Unlocking Merchant Growth in Emerging Markets, with João Del Valle, EBANX
In this episode, Drew Edmond is joined by João Del Valle, CEO and co-founder of EBANX, to talk about the origin story of EBANX, why Brazil has historically been such a difficult market for non-Brazilian merchants, and what João has learned as the company has expanded into new regions.
Listen in as they cover some of the biggest topics shaping the next phase of global payments, including Pix and Pix Automático in Brazil, payment optimization when looking at local payment methods, and perspectives on agentic commerce and stablecoins.
Episode 292 – Modern Authentication and the Impact on Payments Cost and Performance, with Amandeep Batra, Stripe and Dewald Nolte, Entersekt
In this follow-up conversation, Chris Uriarte welcomes back Amandeep Batra from Stripe and Dewald Nolte from Entersekt to discuss updated research and analysis on 3-D Secure and tokenization and to explore how authentication and tokenization interact in practice across different regulatory environments.
News
Glenbrook objectively curates the news to keep you abreast of important daily headlines in payments.
OQC, JPMorganChase and AMD Commence Research Collaboration to Develop New Quantum-AI Platform in London
"OQC, JPMorganChase and AMD today announced a research collaboration leveraging a new and dedicated Quantum-AI Data Centre, built by OQC in London. JPMorganChase researchers will test near-term quantum and hybrid quantum-classical computing applications via a secure...
Colorado Bill To Cut Sales Tax from Interchange Calculation Vetoed
"Colorado’s SB 26-134, a bill that would have eliminated sales tax as part of the interchange-fee calculation, has been vetoed by Gov. Jared Polis. SB 26-134, similar to the Illinois Interchange Fee Prohibition Act, would have taken effect Jan. 1, 2028, had Polis...
Visa And Mastercard Collaborate On New Stablecoin Platform
"Credit card giants Visa and Mastercard are reportedly close to introducing a new stablecoin platform. Media reports say that global payment network Stripe and U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global (NASDAQ: $COIN) also plan to participate in the stablecoin...
Ready to see how Glenbrook can support your marketplaces and platform company to be as efficient and effective as possible?