When you move money on behalf of others, you inherit a balance sheet, a compliance perimeter, and a settlement engine. This is how to build all three.
Embedded finance and platform payments are where the most commerce growth is happening, and the catalog has nothing on the platform seat. The hard parts (ledger, payout, merchant-of-record liability) are exactly the parts vendor docs gloss.
We work from the day you stop being a single merchant and become a money-movement platform: settlement models, the merchant-of-record decision, onboarding, the ledger and payout engine, and where liability really lands.
The day you split a payment on behalf of other sellers, you stop being a merchant and become an entity that touches other people's money. This lesson maps what that single decision changes in your liability, your licensing, and your flow of funds.
The two ways a platform can settle multiparty payments, and how each one decides who holds the cash, who earns the float, and who eats the loss when a transaction reverses.
Deciding whether your platform or your seller is the legal merchant determines who owns the sale, the sales tax, the chargeback, and the regulatory exposure. This lesson shows how to make that call deliberately.
Embedded KYC and KYB is a compliance gate every seller must pass, but a good gate stages its checks against capabilities so most sellers transact before they finish. This lesson shows how to design the gate so it protects the platform without killing conversion.
How to build the internal ledger that records every balance, hold, and reversal on your platform, why double-entry and immutability are non-negotiable, and how to handle the negative balances that auditors will ask about first.
A practitioner's guide to the money-out side of a platform: when funds release, which rails carry them, how to send thousands at once, and what cross-border actually costs.
Three models, three very different relationships with the card networks. We break down what each one obligates you to own, where the registration line sits, and how to choose without painting yourself into a corner.
A practitioner's map of the three compliance regimes that bite platforms moving other people's money: PSD2/PSD3 licensing, AML and sanctions duties, and the liability waterfall when something breaks.
A practitioner's map of dispute and fraud liability in multiparty payments: who the network holds responsible, who actually pays, and how the gap between the two becomes a design problem you have to solve before a seller goes negative.
A practitioner's read on Stripe Connect, Adyen for Platforms, and Mangopay, the trade-offs each one locks you into, and why the switching cost is rarely the line item you budgeted for.