Braintree Service Helps Online Markets Divvy Up Mobile Payments

A new Braintree service is designed to help market-style businesses streamline the process of splitting incoming consumer payments between their online stores and selling partners.

The mobile-optimized service is called Marketplace and is incorporated into Braintree's core payments platform. Online markets like Airbnb, TaskRabbit and Uber provide a central hub for smaller submerchants to sell their goods and services. When a consumer makes a purchase from the online market, Braintree's service automates the process of accepting the payment and routes the money owed to the online market and merchant that made the sale.

There are no extra fees to use Marketplace. The online markets are charged the existing 2.9% plus 30 cents for credit card transactions.

Submerchants can sign up with a mobile phone number or email address to receive next-day payout using the Venmo mobile payments app. Consumers can use the Venmo Touch mobile wallet to make one-click purchases without having to re-enter credit card information on their mobile devices.

Braintree acquired Venmo in August 2012 to build a one-click mobile wallet product. Recently Simple Financial Technology Corp. began offering Venmo Touch to its users. Simple is an alternative to traditional financial institutions, offering services through electronic channels.

“Given the rapidly growing ability to access everything from a mobile device, consumers are quickly gravitating to next-generation marketplaces and collaborative consumption models,” says Bill Ready, CEO of Braintree, in an Aug 14 press release. “We created Marketplace so that our customers can keep growing their communities with far less regulatory burden and their users, both buyers and sellers, can easily transact via their mobile devices.”

Since Braintree manages the money flow, instead of the marketplace operator, many regulatory and compliance concerns are alleviated. For example, Braintree handles tax reporting for the submerchants to help market operators meet Internal Revenue Service requirements.

Braintree has garnered a lot of attention lately, attracting executives from Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Square. The company handles about $10 billion in annual transactions and is continuing to expand internationally.