How trustshare helps marketplaces improve their payment experiences

Marketplaces and digital ecosystems — where individual vendors come together to offer their products or services to a single customer base — will be responsible for 30% of global economic activity by 2025, according to research from McKinsey.

But Marketplaces are no longer simply the place where you buy and sell your goods and services. In both B2B and consumer-facing industries, modern marketplaces are taking the lead by owning more of the transaction touch points — including faster, simpler payment acceptance — further embedding fintech into the marketplace experience and adding value for both buyers and vendors.

trustshare: helping marketplaces improve their financial experiences

However, adding fintech to marketplaces can be complex, with many legal, regulatory and licensing hurdles that hamper the seller and consumer experience. For example, marketplaces aren’t allowed to hold customer money unless they are regulated.

That’s where trustshare comes in. It offers a fintech layer for marketplaces across payments, escrow, banking and credit. And trustshare also recently started offering open banking payments, powered by TrueLayer.

We spoke with trustshare co-founder and CEO, Nick Fulton, to learn more about how the company is helping marketplaces improve the financial experience for vendors and consumers alike.

“We originally launched in 2020 with a very easy-to-integrate escrow product because we were seeing a lot of marketplaces that wanted to offer escrow payments, and it’s quite difficult to build out that solution without a trusted partner,” explains Nick. “Now we’re expanding and launching additional payment flows to our API to unlock payments, credit and banking.”

“Our mission is to make fintech simple for marketplaces. And frankly, it’s been very hard for marketplaces to navigate this process of becoming fintech enabled as, prior to trustshare, there wasn’t really a good solution out there to solve this.”

Adding open banking into the marketplace mix

With the mission of simplifying fintech in mind, trustshare realised open banking-powered payments were a vital component of their payment experience, removing a lot of the problems that limit other payment methods. Since integrating with TrueLayer, trustshare has seen positive uptake in its open banking offering:

“Checkout through open banking is one of our most popular payment methods. And it’s really important to our strategy because we can move money from buyers to sellers for marketplaces much quicker than with traditional card rails, whilst maintaining an in-platform feel. We spend a lot of time internally thinking about the problem of payment speed and look to remove bottlenecks like batch payments wherever possible.”

Settlement speed and user experience are really important for marketplaces, Nick explains, because they otherwise run the risk of not collecting their commission revenue whenever it’s possible to pay the seller directly.

“Traditional payment providers can take up to ten days to move money from buyer to seller, which unsurprisingly results in a lot of lost revenue for marketplaces. trustshare can move money from buyer to seller in under 15 seconds and there’s no need for sellers to register and verify before they accept their first payment.”

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"The TrueLayer Payments API is a straightforward gateway to offering new payment services, so we can remain innovative."

Nick Fulton, CEO & Co-founder, trustshare

Marketplaces can collect money by checkout, payment link or generate dedicated accounts for invoice and recurring payments. There are even options to add financing and credit facilities to further add value through the transaction.

Nick recognises the open banking landscape is constantly evolving: “Truelayer’s Payments API is a straightforward gateway to offering new payment services so we can remain innovative and present the best solutions to our customers.”

Find out more about how TrueLayer can help both marketplaces and other ecommerce brands offer instant, secure payment experiences to their vendors and customers.