Ran Grushkowsky is CEO of MassPay, a global payout orchestration platform specializing in instant, real-time payouts worldwide.
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The payments industry talks about payouts from the sender's side: coverage maps, rails, settlement windows, basis points. I never did. I started building MassPay for the payee because I saw how bad the receiving experience was, and I knew it could and should be better.
People were waiting days for money they had already earned, losing a cut to fees no one explained and getting paid through methods they could barely use. Everything we built across 180 countries started from fixing that.
What the payee experiences has nothing to do with rails. A driver finishing a shift in Manila, a seller in Sao Paulo who just shipped an order and a freelancer in Bogota who sent the final files are all asking the same four questions about their money. Answer those questions well, and they keep working on your platform. Answer them poorly, and they take their work somewhere else.
"When do I get my money?"
For the sender, a payout is a batch file that runs on Friday. For the payee, it's rent, fuel and the ability to take the next job.
In a 2022 study of gig workers by the nonprofit Commonwealth, most participants held $1,000 or less in savings, and more than 40% had none at all. The Federal Reserve's research from 2024 confirmed the pattern, finding that gig workers were less likely than other adults to have three months of emergency savings or to have paid all their bills in the prior month. For someone that close to the edge, a three-day settlement window is a gap bridged with borrowing, skipped bills or turned-down work.
Payees price that gap precisely. A 2025 survey commissioned by Visa found that 80% of responding cross-border gig workers said they would pay a small fee for instant payouts. They're offering to buy back their own liquidity. That should tell every platform what the delay is costing the people it pays.
"How much of it do I actually keep?"
There's a quiet erosion between what the sender pays and what the payee receives: wire fees, lifting fees at intermediary banks the payee has never heard of, an FX spread buried in a rate no one showed them.
The payee didn't agree to any of this. A 2025 report from The World Bank found that the global average cost of sending $200 across borders was 6.36% and nearly 15% if it moved through a bank. A slice of what they earned evaporates in transit, and no one can tell them exactly where it went.
From their side, it doesn't matter whether the leakage came from correspondent banking or FX markup; it reads as their platform shorting them. The fix is showing the payee the amount they'll receive, in their currency, before the money moves and having that number be the number that lands.
"Can I use it where I live?"
A payout that arrives as a bank wire is useless to someone who doesn't bank. The World Bank found that 1.3 billion adults still lack any financial account. Among those who have one, it's increasingly a mobile money account.
The tools people actually live on are local. According to an FXC Intelligence report, Brazil's Pix processed nearly 80 billion transactions in 2025 and reaches more than 90% of the country's adults. FXC Intelligence also highlighted that India's UPI handled 228 billion transactions in the same year. A creator in the Philippines might run their financial life through GCash. A worker in a rural market may need cash pickup within walking distance. For each of them, "getting paid" means money arriving in the instrument they already use to pay for dinner.
The payee's ideal is choice. They want to pick the method, the currency and the account, and they want to be able to change that choice when life changes without filing a support ticket.
"Do I know where it is?"
When money's in transit and invisible, the payee assumes the worst—and they're the one refreshing an app at midnight, not the sender. Every "where's my payment?" ticket is a person who couldn't answer that question on their own.
Status, expected arrival time and the exact amount landing should be visible to the payee at every step. That transparency is how a platform earns trust, and trust is what keeps payees from testing the alternatives.
Payees vote with their feet.
Payees have alternatives, and they use them. In Worldpay's survey of U.S. gig workers, seven in 10 were active on multiple platforms, and Visa's research found 73% of surveyed online gig workers were frustrated enough with cross-border payouts to want to switch to a platform that handled them better. When the work is comparable, the payout experience is the tiebreaker.
Businesses spend enormous energy optimizing how customers pay them. The payee deserves the same energy because the payee is also a customer too—of your platform, your marketplace and your supply side.
Here's the bottom line.
Every payout lands on a person with bills due this week and a phone in their hand. They don't care about your rails or your coverage map. They care that the money arrives now, arrives whole, arrives where they can use it and never leaves them guessing.
Those four answers are the product. Global reach gets you into a market. Care for the individual on the receiving end is what keeps you there.
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