Marketplace payouts in the UK: splits, onboarding and who holds the money

Every marketplace starts the same way. Buyers pay the marketplace. Each week someone matches what came in to who is owed what, chases three sellers for bank details, and sends a batch of bank transfers. A refund lands on Monday for an order whose seller was paid on Friday. It worked at fifty sellers. At five hundred it is a job, at five thousand it is a department, and all of it is margin the marketplace never sees.

The spreadsheet is also the thing a regulator or a large customer will ask about first, because it means the marketplace has been holding other people's money. This guide explains how the money should move instead, in words, and ends with the checklist to go through before anyone writes code.

Follow one order of £100 for a service where the marketplace takes a 10% fee.

1. The buyer pays £100 inside the marketplace, by card, by Direct Debit or by bank. The payment is authorised and captured by the regulated acquiring partner on behalf of the seller, not on behalf of the marketplace.
2. The payment is divided as it lands. The partner records £90 to the seller and £10 to the marketplace at the moment of capture. There is no later step where the marketplace works out who is owed what; the split is an instruction sent with the payment.
3. The money sits with the regulated acquiring partner from capture until payout. The marketplace never holds it, and neither does any intermediary that is not itself the regulated party. The marketplace sees balances and records; it does not touch funds.
4. The seller is paid out to their own bank account on the schedule the marketplace has set: daily, weekly, on a day of the month, or when the balance passes a threshold. The £10 fee is paid to the marketplace's own account on the same or a separate schedule.
5. A refund or dispute reverses the split. If the buyer is refunded £100, £90 comes back from the seller's side and £10 from the marketplace's, by the same rule that divided the payment. If the seller has already been paid out, the regulated partner recovers it from the seller's next payouts, which is why onboarding a seller properly matters before their first sale.

The whole flow produces one record: a payment, its split, its payout, and any reversal, each tied to the order in the marketplace. That record is what finance reconciles, what sellers see on their statement, and what the marketplace shows a regulator if asked.

The FCA's guidance on the commercial agent exclusion is the short version of UK law here. A business that negotiates or concludes a sale on behalf of the payer or the payee, but not both, can sit outside the Payment Services Regulations. The FCA says a business is likely to be acting for both payer and payee, and so likely to need authorisation or registration, if payments are transferred into an account it controls or manages before being sent to the payee, and the payer's debt is only settled once the payee has received payment. That description fits the payout spreadsheet exactly.

An authorised payment institution has to safeguard customer funds, and from 7 May 2026 the FCA's PS25/12 strengthens that regime: daily reconciliation, a resolution pack, and for many firms an external audit. Those obligations are right for a firm whose business is holding money. For a marketplace whose business is matching buyers and sellers, the sensible answer is to have the money held by a regulated acquiring partner from the moment the buyer pays, so the marketplace is never in the regulated middle. The marketplace sets the split and its fee; it does not hold anyone's money. This is also how Synapto works: Synapto does not hold funds either, the regulated acquiring partner does.

A seller cannot be paid out until the regulated partner knows who they are, who owns them and where the money is going. That means identity checks on the business and its beneficial owners, a check on the bank account, and a decision on how much risk the seller carries. In a well-built marketplace all of this happens inside the marketplace's own sign-up flow, branded as the marketplace, with the checks run by the partner behind the screens.

Three design decisions decide whether onboarding is a step or a wall:

• Collect what is needed when it is needed. A seller can list before they are fully verified; they cannot be paid out. Ask for ownership documents when a payout is approaching, not on day one.
• Keep the seller inside your product. Sending a seller to a third party's form to finish verification loses a share of them at the door.
• Tell the seller what happens to their money. When they will be paid, to which account, what the statement will show, and what happens on a refund. Sellers who understand the flow do not ring support on payout day.

The payout schedule is a product decision with a cash consequence for the seller. Daily payouts suit sellers who live on cash flow, such as drivers and small traders. Weekly or monthly suits sellers who want one line on a statement. Threshold payouts suit low-value, high-frequency sellers. The marketplace can set a default and let sellers choose within limits.

Your finance team will ask four questions, and the flow above should answer all of them from one record:

1. Does the sum of seller payouts, marketplace fees and refunds equal what buyers paid, every day?
2. Where is every pound that has been paid by a buyer but not yet paid out, and who holds it?
3. When a refund lands after payout, who recovers it and how?
4. What does the seller's statement show, and does it match what the ledger shows?

If the answer to the second question is "in our bank account", go back to the section above.

Go through this before the first line of integration code. Your developer owns the marketplace's integration; the payment products underneath, such as seller onboarding, the split rules and payouts, are built with a payments partner.

• Who is the regulated acquiring partner, and is it confirmed in writing that it holds the funds from capture to payout?
• Is the split an instruction sent with each payment, not a calculation done afterwards?
• What is the fee rule: a percentage, a fixed amount, a mix, and does it vary by seller group?
• What has to be true about a seller before their first payout, and where in your product is each check collected?
• What is the default payout schedule, what can sellers change, and what is the minimum payout amount?
• How does a refund or dispute reverse the split, and what happens if the seller has already been paid?
• What does the seller statement look like, and does your finance team get one record of payment, split, payout and reversal per order?
• Which sellers take payments elsewhere today, and what is the plan to move them in groups rather than all at once?
• Are buyers and sellers in the UK and settling in GBP? If a large share are not, the model needs a different partner.