Getting creators paid accurately, on time, and in their preferred currency requires more compliance, tax, and fraud infrastructure than most platforms anticipate. In a survey of 450 independent earners conducted by financial software platform Trolley, 41% of participants said payment delays could be enough to make them stop working with a platform, the highest-ranked concern.

Trolley founder and CEO Tim Nixon saw the problem early. He launched the Montreal-based company in 2015 after more than a decade in operations and payments roles across Australia, the UK, and Canada, at a time when many creator platforms were using consumer e-wallets to handle payouts. “The options available weren’t really solving the real challenge for either the sender or the recipient,” he says.

Tim says Trolley now processes “billions of dollars to millions of recipients” for creator platforms including Canva, Grin, Envato, Viral Nation, and SoundCloud across more than 200 countries and territories. The company handles the infrastructure around a payout, from identity verification and tax documentation to payment delivery and year-end reporting. Tim describes that role as closer to payroll infrastructure than a conventional payment processor. “Nobody as a business owner can ever miss payroll,” he says. “It’s the same situation for companies paying independent contractors.”

His broader argument is that payments should be treated as a creator-retention issue rather than a back-office function. Platforms compete for creators through monetization tools, content features, and access to brand opportunities, but the payment experience can also determine whether creators continue working with them. The Trolley survey found that creators are the least loyal of independent earners, with 97% considering leaving a platform for any reason (vs. 13% of gig workers or 21% of music/royalty earners). The report uncovered that payment reliability was the top priority for creators continuing to use a platform, beating out maximizing earnings. “Creating an experience where creators are in control and know what is happening with their payouts is critical for any creator platform,” Tim says.   

Creator Payments End With Tax Season, Not the Transfer

Tim breaks the creator payment process into three phases, none of which resembles a simple bank transfer. Before a dollar moves, a platform must collect information needed to meet anti-money laundering requirements, verify the creator’s tax status through a W-9 or W-8 form, confirm their preferred payout method, and validate bank account formats that vary by country. “You need to collect a lot of information and verify and validate that information even before you start to send payments,” he says.

Once the payment is initiated, the platform must handle withholding calculations, currency conversion, and reference data linking the transfer to a specific campaign or job. Failed payments require active resolution. Every transaction must also pass AML screening and transaction monitoring, obligations that accumulate quietly until a compliance review or payment dispute makes them visible.

The obligation doesn’t end when the transfer clears. Depending on the recipient’s tax status and location and the source and type of income, platforms may need to file forms such as 1099-NEC, 1099-MISC, or 1042-S with recipients and/or U.S. tax authorities at year-end. “It’s a pretty complicated end-to-end experience,” Tim says. That complexity is not static. Tax rules change. Platforms that underestimate the ongoing nature of that compliance burden often discover the problem only after it becomes costly.

That lesson arrived early for Trolley. In the platform’s early testing phase, Tim recalls sitting in a customer’s office and discovering that bank account format validation for recipients in South America and Mexico was not as strong as it needed to be. “We realized maybe the validation of some of these bank account formats is not as strong as it could be,” he says. “We needed to go and do a better job here.” The experience set a standard Trolley has applied since: new payment corridors must work reliably before they launch.

Most Platforms Start Simple and Hit a Compliance Wall at Scale

Tim’s most consistent observation is that platforms underestimate the distance between processing a payment and operating a compliant payout program. Early-stage influencer platforms often integrate PayPal as an initial solution, treating the problem as solved. “Often, we see people doing this in-house,” he says. “We often run across companies that realize they didn’t handle tax treatment properly.”

As creator headcount grows and the jurisdictional mix expands, the tax reporting obligations that once seemed manageable become operationally demanding in ways most product teams are not equipped to handle. “There are a lot of regulatory requirements and licensing requirements to hold customer money going down that route,” Tim says. 

Platforms that build payments compliance internally, he argues, are trading engineering capacity that could go toward improving their core product. “It comes down to core focus: do you want your engineering team spending cycles making your core product unique, or wrestling with regulatory maintenance?’” Tim asks. For Trolley, handling that heavy compliance lifting is the product itself. “We thrive on solving the underlying infrastructure so our clients can focus entirely on growing their creator ecosystem,” Tim adds.

Speed Is Now Expected. The Risk Controls Have to Match.

Trolley is investing heavily in instant payment capabilities in 2026. The company is deploying Mastercard and Visa Direct push-to-card payouts that settle in 30 minutes or less, adding support for 80 mobile wallets across Africa and Asia, and preparing to launch real-time bank transfers in the U.S. Real-time transfers are already available in the UK, the Euro SEPA zone, and India. Stablecoin instant payments are in planning.

For platforms deciding where to invest in their payouts stacks, Tim’s guidance is direct. “If you’re only offering PayPal or bank transfer, that’s pretty limited in today’s environment,” he says. “There are many people who prefer to get paid more instantly, soon after they earn that income.”

The speed push introduces a risk management problem that Tim describes as different from standard payment risk. “When you send a payment, and it’s delivered instantly, the money is often not recoverable at that point,” he says. That constraint has become a driver of Trolley’s AI and automation roadmap. The platform is building automated workflows that trigger identity verification before high-risk payouts, such as those following a payout method change or a login from an unexpected location. AI is also being applied to optimize payment routing and success rates. “We have very low failure rates of payments across the board,” Tim says, “but we’re always striving to minimize that further.”

As Tax Rules Shift, Trolley’s Bet Is Staying Narrow

Tim’s advice for platform executives confronting the payments complexity problem is consistent with Trolley’s own strategic logic: find a specialist and don’t replicate the capability internally. “Brands and platforms paying creators at scale really shouldn’t be trying to solve all these challenges in-house,” he says. “There are specialist companies that can solve all these related challenges.”

For Trolley, that specialization is explicitly bounded. The company has avoided expanding into credit card acquiring, accounts payable automation, or e-wallet products, i.e., categories where several competitors have moved. Regulatory requirements in the payouts space have changed every year since Trolley launched, covering IRS tax filing thresholds, European DAC 7 reporting obligations, and shifting payout method preferences across individual markets. 

“Every single year since we started the business, there have been changes that our customers would otherwise have to be doing themselves,” he says. “Partnering with a company totally focused on solving those particular challenges is where brands and platforms should be planning.”

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