Most of the digital economy’s spotlight falls upon the glamorous. Think viral content, multimillion-dollar games and tournaments, blockbuster game launches, and influencer-driven brand deals.
But behind the glitz lies a stubborn bottleneck, the thorny question of getting money from companies to athletes, creators and tournament winners quickly, compliantly and at scale. While payments are never the main attraction, they are always mission-critical.
“Payments are not sexy, but it’s infrastructure or service,” Payment Labs CEO Han Park told PYMNTS. “It’s your typical picks and shovels layer that needs to exist to help scale this industry.”
Consider an eSports championship in which a teenager in Malaysia wins $50,000, or a TikTok creator in Brazil lands a brand campaign with a company in the United States. In legacy banking systems, those transactions can take weeks, triggering high fees and bureaucratic scrutiny along the way.
The traditional financial system was not designed for the kind of fragmented, globalized and digital-first work emerging today. Banks were built to service businesses with clear geographic footprints, predictable payment cycles, and regulated payroll structures.
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By contrast, the creator and sports economies run on ad-hoc sponsorship deals, tournament prizes, royalties and microtransactions that span dozens of countries and operate at unpredictable scales.
Park said he and Payment Labs see this as an opportunity.
Compliance Moves From Back Office to Front Line
The solution is not just faster payments, but infrastructure that treats compliance, trust and scalability as core features rather than afterthoughts.
“Oftentimes compliance holds up and delays a lot of these payments,” Park said. “And our customers, or their internal personnel, don’t understand how to address these efficiently and speed these payments up by providing the right documentation.”
Payment Labs positions itself as a one-stop software layer for pay-ins and payouts. The company claims coverage in 180 countries and supports 150 currencies, embedding compliance, tax modules and identity checks into its workflows.
Clients include Microsoft, Sega and the X Games, which use Payment Labs to handle tournament prizes, royalties, NIL (name, image, likeness) deals and micropayments.
“Where we succeeded in solving the eSports problem really translated well to other industries that had a global payments challenge, including the creator economy and traditional sports,” Park said.
“For companies of that scale, their core business is publishing and selling games,” he added. “What they’re looking for is to mitigate a lot of the risk associated with privacy data, taxes, to a third party that can actually handle it as a turnkey provider… You minimize the amount of payment support issues from the gamers and athletes that are always constantly saying, ‘Where’s my money?”
A small U.S.-based league might only need help with domestic athlete payments. A global sports organization with participants from dozens of countries, by contrast, requires constant navigation of cross-border tax and regulatory requirements. Payment Labs scales its fees accordingly.
By pooling volume, the company can negotiate lower rates from financial partners and pass savings on to customers, while earning revenue share on certain payment methods like instant payouts or push-to-card transfers.
The Bigger Picture for Payments
The transformation of payment infrastructure is less visible than a viral video or a championship highlight reel, but its impact is more enduring. By turning what was once a messy, manual and risk-laden process into an efficient, automated and trusted system, the new infrastructure is laying the foundation for industries still finding their footing in a global, digital-first world.
“Think about it from a customer use case,” Park said. “They just upload a batch of payments that has the email and the amount. And then we take care of everything from onboarding the individual, making sure their tax information is correct, and then getting them the payment in the method they want.”
“Ultimately, what we built is very vanilla in terms of FinTech solution of how we do things,” he said. “It’s just that we address the purposes behind each of the verticals that we’re targeting, and created the flows that make sense within those verticals to make it efficient, simple to use and more streamlined.”
Payments may never be glamorous, but they are the quiet force making the creator and sports economies possible. As history has shown time and again, the companies that own the invisible layers of infrastructure are often the ones that shape the future.
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