Earnings arrive the same day.
Food delivery, ride-hailing, freelance markets, repair apps, creator payouts. Hundreds or thousands of contractors, every day, in different EU countries — Lemonway will spend six months getting you onboarded. Modena puts you in sandbox in an hour.
- Worker KYC
- < 2 minutes
- Payout speed
- SEPA Instant ≤ 10s
- Cost ceiling
- Flat per-payout
Customer
Pays for service
Platform wallet
Collect + split
Worker wallet
Per-person segregated
Instant payout
SEPA SCT Inst
Five forces that make gig-platform payments structurally hard.
The structural costs of building your platform on a generic PSP.
Frequency and volume break standard SEPA economics.
A typical platform runs 10,000+ small payouts a day. Standard SEPA is slow, batch-oriented, and every transfer carries a fee — at gig scale, those fees and delays are a margin and retention problem.
Workers expect their money instantly, not at month-end.
Couriers and drivers compare your pay-cycle to the next app's. Same-day wins. Weekly batch is a retention tax — and increasingly a recruiting one.
Employer-like payment handling triggers misclassification risk.
If your payment flow looks like payroll, tax authorities may reclassify the contracting relationship. A clearly segregated, contractor-controlled wallet strengthens the independent-contractor argument.
KYC on a long tail of sole traders, across borders.
An Estonian platform may pay contractors in Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Germany — each country's banking quirks and ID flows are a separate headache. KYC has to be done once and reused, or the friction kills the funnel.
Modena solves all five with a payments stack tuned for the workload.
The same problems, neutralised by infrastructure built for the job.
Mass payouts in one API call
Thousands of payouts in parallel, not sequentially. One request, one ledger entry per worker, one webhook stream per outcome — no overnight batch jobs and no per-row failure cleanup.
SEPA Instant by default, where supported
Workers see the money within ten seconds of tapping cash out, including weekends and holidays. Fall-back to SEPA Credit Transfer is automatic where instant rails aren't available.
Virtual IBAN per contractor
Each contractor has a personal account where earnings, tips and bonuses accumulate. The "money in my wallet" feeling beats waiting on a transfer — and reinforces the contractor-not-employee narrative.
KYC once, reused forever
Contractor verifies their identity at sign-up. All subsequent earnings, tips and bonuses settle automatically against the same identity, with ongoing monitoring on the back end.
Tip and bonus logic
Drop a bonus into a contractor's wallet in real time without spinning up a new transfer. Customer tips route the same way — same ledger, same payout flow, no extra integration.
EEA coverage under one contract
Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Germany, France, Spain — all 30 EEA markets under a single Modena agreement. No country-by-country PSP rollout, no separate compliance reviews per region.
What it changes for the people on your platform.
A payment that arrives in seconds is a different product than one that arrives next Tuesday.
What contractors get
- Cash out the moment a shift ends — money in their bank within ten seconds on SEPA Instant.
- A personal wallet with running balance, tips and bonuses visible in real time.
- ID verified once, reused across every future payout — no repeat onboarding friction.
- Exportable per-contractor transaction history for their own tax filings.
What your customers get
- Tipping that lands instantly in the contractor's wallet — visible recognition, not a delayed transaction.
- Refunds returned in seconds rather than business days when something goes wrong.
- PSD2-compliant authentication where a transaction warrants it; frictionless flows where it doesn't.
- A platform that pays its workers fairly and transparently — increasingly a buying criterion.
Cash out a gig worker with one API call.
A short, real flow — copy it into your repo and start extending.
255,255,255,0.4)">// 1. Credit this shift's earnings to the worker's wallet.
"color:#FFE66D">await modena.ledger.credit({
wallet: worker.walletId,
amount: shift.earningsCents,
currency: "eur",
reference: `Shift ${shift.id}`,
});
255,255,255,0.4)">// 2. Worker taps "cash out" "color:#FFE66D">in your app — just forward it to Modena.
"color:#FFE66D">await modena.payouts.create({
wallet: worker.walletId,
amount: worker.cashOutAmount,
currency: "eur",
beneficiary: worker.bankBeneficiaryId,
method: "sepa_instant",
metadata: { source: "worker_self_service" },
}, { idempotencyKey: `cashout-${shift.id}-${Date.now()}` });You need to pay hundreds or thousands of people every day. Each one wants their money instantly. Each one is a sole trader in a different EU country. Modena puts you in sandbox in an hour, and in production in weeks.
Five things that hold whether you run a marketplace, a crowdfund, or a gig platform.
The product changes per vertical. The structural reasons to build on Modena don't.
You don't have to become a bank.
A PI licence is a years-long, multi-million-euro project. Modena gives you that infrastructure on day one — without the licensing detour.
Fund segregation is not optional.
5AMLD, PSD2 and ECSP each require it. Modena does it by default — every wallet on the platform is a segregated client account at an EU credit institution.
KYC and KYB are solved problems.
Built-in onboarding for individuals and businesses, ongoing monitoring, and audit trail — so your team isn't building compliance ops from scratch.
Integration speed = time to market.
Lemonway and Mangopay measure onboarding in quarters. With Modena it's weeks: typed SDKs, sandbox in an hour, and engineers on a shared Slack.
EU-native, end to end.
Estonian-licensed, EEA-passported. Jurisdiction, data residency, regulator and customer support all sit in the EU — not in the US, not in post-Brexit UK.
A payments partner that speaks your vertical.
Share what you're building. We'll map your flow to Modena APIs and come back with a plan.