Mass payouts explained

Whether you’re responsible for paying hundreds of gig workers on multiple continents, or distributing funds to marketplace sellers making dozens of transactions a day, ensuring accurate, timely payments on a global scale presents serious challenges. 

But not with mass payouts. Using a single automated system, you can conduct mass payments in multiple currencies to as many recipients as necessary. 

From subscription-based businesses to those operating in financial services, many organizations can take advantage of mass payouts to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and build stronger relationships with suppliers and contractors.

In this article, we explain how mass payouts work, who should use them, the key benefits, and how Checkout.com can help your business offer mass payments to your clients. 

What are mass payouts?

Mass payouts - also known as batch or bulk payments - are the method by which a single business pays a large number of recipients simultaneously. These businesses are often organizations that work with large numbers of freelancers, suppliers, or smaller merchants. The transactions are made online, usually through a mass payout system, which automates the process for accuracy and efficiency. 

A mass payout can be conducted regardless of the recipient’s currency, location, or preferred payment method.

When is mass payouts relevant for businesses?

Mass payouts are relevant to any business that needs to pay accurate sums to a large number of recipients, wherever they are in the world, while saving time and minimizing the risk of error. For example:

Ecommerce marketplaces

Online marketplace can host hundreds or even thousands of sellers, each making dozens of sales a day, and often operating in multiple countries and currencies. Mass payouts make it easy to automate a large number of cross-border payments, reducing the complexity of local differences and saving you time and money in the process. 

Subscriptions

Mass payout systems are not only useful for sending payments, but also collecting them. If you’re a subscription-based business, you can use a mass payout system to automate the collection of recurring fees from your customer base, providing a seamless customer experience, while ensuring you maintain a healthy annual recurring revenue and cashflow. 

Global and local payroll

Automating salary disbursements to your workforce with a mass payout system is a great way to reduce the administrative burden of payroll, while ensuring accuracy. It’s also the perfect option for organizations with remote workers and contractors in multiple countries. With a mass payout system, you can simplify payroll across a global workforce, whether you need to pay regular salaries on the same date every month, or varying amounts to freelancers. 

Financial services

If you run a bank, and you need to disburse secure payments to numerous business clients every day, to fulfill these payments manually would, at best, be very time-consuming and, at worst, risk making major errors. With mass payouts, it’s easy to arrange regular batch payments to clients. 

Mass payouts can also be used to distribute funds to multiple affected parties in the event of a successful insurance claim, or for platforms to pay sums to a business raising money in a crowdfunding campaign. 

Gig economy

As with online marketplaces, gig economy businesses like delivery or ride-hailing services can have thousands of workers across multiple continents, all with different requirements and varied earnings. Mass payout systems take the hassle and complexity out of paying these workers the sums they’re due, and ensures a positive working relationship. 

Affiliate marketing programs 

Any company that uses affiliate marketing as a promotional tool needs to regularly pay performance-based commissions to their partners. By conducting these payouts through an automated system, you can maintain an effective brand-partner relationship, which incentivizes further promotion. 

Advantages of mass payouts

Smart platforms have made it even easier to process and send batch payments where multiple variables are at play, including amounts, currencies, local regulations, and preferences. Here are the main advantages of mass payouts:

Efficient and time saving

By automating batch payments through a dedicated platform via straight-through processing (STP), businesses save a significant amount of time and effort that would otherwise be spent on manual data entry. This gives them more capacity to use for less administrative, more fulfilling tasks.  

Secure

Mass payouts are secure in a number of ways. Firstly, it’s easier to guard one single payout against the risk of fraud rather than many individual payments. Secondly, by using a PCI-DSS compliant system, you ensure robust standards of data protection. And thirdly, as you only need a recipient’s phone number or email to pay them, you’re minimizing the amount of data that’s exposed to theft. 

Reduces expenses

The sender simply pays a single fee to conduct multiple transactions through a mass payment system, and there is no charge for the recipient. And aside from the high cost of paying someone to conduct batch payments manually, mass payouts allow the sender to avoid having to pay individual currency exchange and transfer fees for every recipient in each country. However, you should be aware that these payments vary depending on where the money is being sent. 

Global

Mass payments make it just as easy to pay someone in Europe as it is to pay someone in Asia. You can send money in the recipient's domestic currency and preferred payment method, while avoiding the complexity of local fees and regulations usually associated with cross-border payments. 

Enhanced monitoring and precision

Automated mass payout systems make it easy to pay in a timely and consistent fashion, especially when you’re paying the same amount at the same time each month. What’s more, you can monitor transactions within your payout system to ensure they’ve been successfully delivered. 

Better relationships 

As well as receiving their payments promptly, in most cases, your recipients are able to withdraw their funds almost immediately, ensuring a healthy relationship between your organization and its suppliers or contractors. 

How Checkout.com can help you with mass payouts

Checkout.com’s payout solution is perfect for fast-growing global enterprises that demand flexibility and efficiency. We allow you to payout directly to Mastercard and Visa cards any day, any time, with funds available to your customers within minutes. 

From one single integration, you can payout to more than 170 countries and 100 currencies at competitive rates. And with our data-enabled tools and real-time transaction data, you're empowered to continually optimize your operations in order to provide better customer experiences and fuel growth. 

Find out more about Payouts with Checkout.com.