The Creator Economy operates in real time. Views update instantly. Comments roll in by the second. Campaign performance dashboards refresh almost at the speed of light.

And payouts just don’t.

Across agencies and platforms, payout systems still rely on batch processing, heavy manual reconciliation, and legacy banking rails. As organizations scale to hundreds or thousands of creators, that friction compounds in the background.

For Lukas Steiner, co-founder and CEO of Talentir, the widening gap between what is already technologically possible and how global payouts still function pushed his team to solve what he calls the “Last Mile of Finance”.

“Waiting weeks, and often months, for money you’ve already earned slows innovation and frustrates creators,” he says. “Real-time access to your own revenue should be the standard. The technology and infrastructure are already there to make payout delays a thing of the past”.

The Vienna-based scale-up Talentir is becoming the fastest-growing payout infrastructure within the Creative Industry. Their embedded financial layer fully automates splits, rights management, invoicing, accounting, reconciliation, treasury, and global disbursements for agencies, MCNs (Multi-Channel Networks), platforms, labels, distributors, and enterprises at scale. Rather than acting as a talent representative or network, the company integrates into existing workflows and rewires how money moves behind the scenes.

“We are incredibly proud to help all our clients scale and ultimately drive down costs associated with the payout process,” Lukas says.

The Breaking Point: Manual Work at Scale

Talentir’s value proposition is rooted in a common operational failure: growth outpacing financial systems. Lukas says there are high-growth businesses that have been around for a couple of years, and they are “so incredibly good at what they do” that operations never had time to keep up with the pace they were setting.

As nano and micro-influencer campaigns become more common, agencies often manage thousands of small payouts per month. Each one may require manual invoicing, tax handling, FX conversion, and internal approvals.

“If you have hundreds of invoices with low volume, you have the jackpot: It’s annoying and super costly if done manually,” Lukas says.

One of Talentir’s early B2B clients, the Berlin-based influencer agency ENKIME, approached the company with precisely that problem. They were processing roughly 2,000 manual invoices per month, which was slowing their ability to scale.

“They said, ‘Look, we want to scale, but the accounting and the manual workload are just blocking everything. Can you help?’”

From Marketplace Experiment to Financial Backbone

Talentir did not begin as an infrastructure company. It initially launched as a marketplace where investors could co-own and trade shares of YouTube videos and channels. 

“When we started, we thought the world had waited for us and our entirely new form to raise money as a creator, but the more we saw that the payout operation itself was the blocker and also the driver for high fees in the industry, we used the underlying payout-tech and automation and leaned more towards solving bottlenecks of the operators in the back,” he says.

The pivot came when the team recognized that the true friction point was not ownership but distribution, and the associated long tail that is always involved in the payout process, like VAT, compliance, and fragmented tax rules. “It’s a mass,” Lukas states.

He adds, “None hates accounting more than we do, so we simply had to build the full 360 agentic payout system to never touch accounting again for ourselves.” 

Real-Time Visibility, Automated Splits

Talentir’s initial credibility came from its integration with YouTube AdSense.

As Lukas explains, the company built a direct API (Application Programming Interface) integration that allows creators to not only see revenue updates in real time but also withdraw the earned AdSense per second, rather than waiting for YouTube to pay on the 21st of the month.

Behind the scenes, Talentir developed a prediction algorithm that estimates earnings and allows creators to access funds earlier. 

“We see immense complexities in the payout processes of our clients, especially when there are splits, affiliates, kickbacks, rights, IP, or worse, like global compliance involved,” Lukas says. “The only way to solve this is by using the absolute latest tech. At some point, humanity also stopped competing with a calculator for mathematical equations. It is simply impossible and also not necessary to do all of this manually.”

For agencies managing hundreds of creators, he notes that these splits can quickly become operationally complex. Talentir’s system distributes funds programmatically; the rule lives inside the transaction.

Importantly, Lukas adds, once the payout is triggered: “People receiving money can always choose between banks, between stablecoins, between Venmo, between whatever you prefer locally. This small adjustment gives creators around the globe instant gratification as stablecoins are becoming the default for international transactions.”

Stablecoins and the Rewiring of Payment Rails

A core part of Talentir’s infrastructure is built on stablecoin technology, which Lukas says enables 24/7 settlement and near-zero foreign exchange costs compared to traditional banking rails.

“We were among the first within the YouTube Universe to use stablecoin technology not only for moving money from A to B in the backend but also to scale bookkeeping and reconciliation – Ja, it might sound counterintuitive, but this is the future of accounting,” he explains. “Every transaction settles as a structured, traceable event. That event creates a single, verifiable source of truth for payouts, revenue splits, and accounting.” “The best thing about this tech – nobody needs to care, it just works,” Lukas says.

While stablecoins remain a sensitive topic in some corporate environments, Lukas argues that the underlying benefit is operational, not speculative: faster settlement, reduced friction, and ultimately more money in everyone’s pockets. 

“More and more enterprises around the globe see the immense potential, but almost no accounting department can handle on-chain transactions in their books,” he says. “That’s where we come in and help connect the dots and technologies.”

Payment Speed as a Retention Strategy

As competition for creators intensifies, Lukas believes payment speed is becoming a strategic lever rather than a backend detail.

“When you ask across different niches, there is only one question that absolutely everyone cares about: ‘When does my money arrive?’”

He warns that companies that delay payouts risk losing creators to partners who can offer faster settlement. “People will go simply to the one who pays them the fastest,” he says. “And if people are not adapting, they take an unnecessarily huge risk. It’s always more expensive to get new customers than to focus on the happiness of those already onboarded.”

In some cases, payout delays are not done intentionally. “Sometimes people really want to ship the money, but they either grew too fast and simply cannot handle the operations, or they are too long on the market and can’t adapt to the insane speed of the market needs.”

Talentir saw that the willingness to upgrade internal systems is always there, but the fear that things will break during the change process is real. “We come in like a SWAT team; everyone loves it when you have a partner who helps implement the latest tech. And everyone loves to have the option to blame someone if things do not work out,” Lukas says with a smile on his face. 

But he also acknowledges the flip side of the coin: companies intentionally slow payments to preserve liquidity.

“If there is a decision to pay out slower just to keep the money, that’s kinda ok when the money is actively put in treasury management. But in 99.9% of cases, that’s not even the case, so we also built an automated treasury for those clients,” Lukas notes. “Money that is not immediately claimed by the creators for whatever reason should at least earn interest while in flight. That’s the future, and so far we are the only player on the market that offers this.”

Scaling Without Breaking

Internally, Talentir is experiencing its own growth pressures.

“Things are going to vertically internally, cause everyone wants to update their payout operation at the same time,” Lukas shares. “We’re now really focusing on getting the whole company up to scale and are actively searching for talent around the globe.”

The company is onboarding enterprise clients, expanding its B2B offering, and hiring to support increasing demand from agencies and platforms seeking to modernize their financial systems.

For Lukas, the larger realization he wants industry executives to consider is financial leakage; costs embedded in payout inefficiencies that often go unnoticed.

“There’s so much money lost on the payout process that people don’t really understand,” he says. “And this is where we come in and do our best to increase the profitability of the payout process as a whole.”

As agencies compete for creators and brands demand operational reliability, the infrastructure behind payouts may become less of a backend function and more of a competitive differentiator.

“The shift is coming,” Lukas says. “And like always, people who adapt will ultimately win.”

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