The default way to think about payments in a marketplace is as a cost centre with compliance requirements. You need to move money from buyers to sellers, you need to do it in compliance with local financial services regulations, you need to minimise fraud, and you need to do it cheaply enough that the economics of the marketplace still work. That framing isn't wrong — it's just incomplete in a way that leaves significant strategic value unrealised.
Payments infrastructure is also the most granular source of transaction truth in a marketplace. Every payment event carries a signal: the purchase amount, the buyer's payment method preference, the settlement timing, the refund rate, the currency, the geographic routing. Aggregated across a marketplace's transaction volume, that data supports product decisions that aren't available through any other signal source. Which payment methods are causing checkout abandonment? Which seller accounts have settlement timing patterns that suggest cash flow pressure? Which buyer segments have payment behaviour that correlates with higher long-term value? The payments layer, when treated as a data asset rather than just an execution system, becomes one of the most strategically valuable parts of a marketplace's infrastructure.
The cross-border dimension makes this more complex and more interesting in APAC specifically. A marketplace facilitating transactions between Australian buyers and Southeast Asian sellers — or between buyers in Singapore and sellers in Indonesia — is navigating a payment infrastructure problem that has no clean template solution. The corridor from Australia to Indonesia, for example, involves an Australian acquiring bank, real-time gross settlement into an Indonesian recipient account denominated in rupiah, compliance with PPATK regulations on outbound currency transfer, and a settlement timing that's acceptable to the Indonesian seller who may be funding their own inventory purchases on tight cycles. Airwallex, which we backed at seed in 2022, has been building payment infrastructure that handles this kind of multi-corridor complexity with a developer-first API layer that makes cross-border payment rails accessible to marketplace platforms that aren't large enough to negotiate direct banking relationships in multiple jurisdictions.
The embedded finance angle is where payments strategy starts to become a genuine differentiator rather than just an operational requirement. A marketplace that can offer its sellers working capital advances funded by their transaction history on the platform — underwritten using the payments data the marketplace already holds — creates a retention mechanism that is extremely difficult for competitors to replicate. The seller who has a working capital facility tied to their marketplace account has a switching cost that goes beyond the product and pricing comparison. Similarly, a marketplace that offers buyers instalment payment options at checkout, using its transaction history to make faster credit decisions than a bank would, is creating a purchase experience advantage in categories where basket size makes instalment payment materially relevant to conversion.
We're not saying every marketplace should become a financial services company — the regulatory complexity of holding financial services licences, managing credit risk, and complying with AML obligations in multiple jurisdictions is a genuine organisational challenge that most marketplace companies are not equipped to take on directly. What we're saying is that the strategic value of payments infrastructure in a marketplace context is much larger than the cost-of-acceptance framing suggests, and the companies that are building API-accessible payment infrastructure that lets marketplaces capture some of that value without becoming full financial services operators are building something genuinely important.