Platforms Reimagine Payments to Keep the Money In-House

Businesses, especially marketplaces and gig platforms, are waking up to the value of building their own banking networks.

According to PYMNTS Intelligence in collaboration with Ingo Payments, the line between payments provider and platform operator is blurring fast. Nearly two-third of businesses surveyed (65%) are highly interested in using in-network accounts or cards to issue payouts like payroll, vendor invoices, rebates or even gaming winnings.

In the platform economy, where payments move as fast as labor and logistics, those numbers spike. An eye-opening 87% of platform-based businesses expressed strong interest in directly paying gig workers through their own financial rails. For merchants and marketplaces, 75% said they want the option to pay suppliers and vendors in-house, not through third-party accounts.

It might just represent a shift that’s bigger than cost optimization or even real-time payments, something more elemental to the post-bank future: Control.

Read more: Digital Wallets Steal the Flow as Disbursements Bypass Bank Accounts

When Disbursements Stop Being Payments

For decades, companies have paid out. And then lost control. The receiver’s account determines where the money goes next. Data about how it’s used evaporates. Cross-selling opportunities vanish. Worse, the sender bank can lose the payment altogether.

Businesses are increasingly trying to flip that script and capture new value from disbursements.  After all, every payment that stays inside a sender’s ecosystem can become a new gateway to higher lifetime value, whether for a gig worker paid via a platform-branded account, a freelancer receiving instant funds to a virtual card, or a consumer being issued a refund as loyalty credit instead of an ACH payment.

Take marketplaces. For merchants selling on popular platforms, getting paid faster is often an existential issue. Yet many marketplaces still rely on ACH transfers that take days to process and land in third-party bank accounts. That means they’re not just paying out to sellers, they’re also losing the chance to offer deposit-linked working capital, cash-flow tools, or other financial products that those sellers would likely adopt if they were already banking where the money lives.

Gig platforms show the pattern even more clearly. Whether it’s food delivery, rideshare driving or freelance services, gig workers depend on predictable, instant payouts. That makes the platform — and its payout rails — an essential part of a worker’s day-to-day financial life.

87 percent of platforms surveyed said they’re interested in paying gig workers directly through their own financial network. They understand that the entity that pays the worker first is the one who wins their trust, data and wallet share.

Read the report: From One-Way Payouts to Two-Way Loyalty: Turning Disbursements Into Long-Term Customer Relationships

Corporate senders don’t have to become banks to offer bank-like services. A new generation of banking-as-a-service and embedded finance platforms are making it easier for companies to spin up virtual accounts, payment cards, or wallets without standing up a charter. Fintech providers, like Ingo Payments, specialize precisely in embedded disbursements, where compliance, risk and transaction monitoring are baked in at scale.

For users, this changes the experience fundamentally. The checkout button on a marketplace becomes the gateway to a credit line. The earnings tab on a gig app becomes a portal to cash advances. The rewards wallet in a loyalty program becomes a spending account with a virtual card. Nothing about the interface screams “banking,” yet every interaction is anchored in deeply regulated financial infrastructure.

The winning platforms of the future could be those that invest in owning the payment rails, keeping data value in-network, and embedding financial features at the moments users need them, not sending them elsewhere.

In the new digital economy, whoever owns the payout might just own the relationship. And whoever owns the relationship owns the future.