Choosing a payments infrastructure partner is one of the most consequential decisions a growing marketplace makes. The right platform has fast seller onboarding, reliable payouts, and a checkout that converts. And it maintains compliance as you expand into new markets. Stripe Connect is included as a reference point throughout. Treat it as a concrete example of what best-in-class marketplace infrastructure looks like in 2026.

This template gives you a structured, end-to-end way to run a request for proposal (RFP) for marketplace payment vendors. It covers the full scope, including seller onboarding, instant payouts, global payment coverage, buyer checkout conversion, money movement compliance, operational tooling, and emerging capabilities such as the Agentic Commerce Protocol.

This RFP template isn’t meant to be used as a rigid form. Think of it as a guide you can (and should) adapt to your specific marketplace model, the markets you serve, and the problems you’re trying to solve.

Table of contents

Cover page

Section A: Administrative instructions

Section B: Overview and scope of work

Section C: Proposal instructions

Section D: Evaluation process

Section E: Core requirements

Section F: Implementation and support

Section G: Commercials

Section H: Vendor profile

Section I: References

Section J: Appendixes

Cover page

The goal of the cover page is to tell vendors exactly what they’re looking at and whom to talk to. It removes ambiguity before vendors invest time in a response.

Here’s what to include in this section:

• Title: RFP for marketplace payments and seller payout infrastructure
  
• Issuing organization: [Your company]
  
• Confidentiality notice (in short, NDA-bound language)
  
• Point of contact: [Name, title, email, phone]
  
• Issue date and proposal due date
  

Here’s an example of how this could look.

Contact information

Key dates

Submission format

All responses must be submitted electronically via email in PDF format. Pricing and scoring templates must be submitted in Excel. Submissions that don’t follow this format might not be evaluated.

File naming convention

[Vendor name]–Marketplace–RFP–Response–[Date].pdf

Purpose of this RFP

[Your company] is seeking a marketplace payments infrastructure partner capable of supporting fast seller onboarding, flexible global payouts, high-converting buyer checkout, and compliant cross-border money movement at scale across [insert markets].

This document outlines the requirements, evaluation criteria, and process for submitting proposals.

Short confidentiality notice

This RFP contains confidential, proprietary information that belongs to [your company]. It’s provided solely to enable vendors to prepare a proposal and must not be shared with third parties without written consent.

Section A: Administrative instructions

This section sets the ground rules. Before vendors invest time in a response, they need to know how the process works, what’s expected, and what the timeline looks like. Be precise here. Ambiguity in the admin section creates problems later.

Include:

• Confidentiality and nondisclosure obligations
  
• Limitation of liability
  
• RFP timeline with key dates
  
• Submission format and file naming conventions
  
• Point of contact and communication rules
  
• Vendor acknowledgment form
  

Here’s an example of how this could look.

A.1 Statement of confidentiality and nondisclosure

All information in this RFP is confidential and intended solely to enable the vendor to prepare a response. Vendors must not disclose, reproduce, or distribute this document or any portion of it without prior written consent from [your company]. Proprietary information included in proposals should be clearly labeled; [your company] will treat it accordingly.

A.2 Limitation of financial liability

This RFP isn’t an offer to contract. [Your company] is under no obligation to award a contract or reimburse costs incurred in preparing a response. Vendors are solely responsible for their own expenses throughout this process.

A.3 RFP timeline

A.4 Submission guidelines

• All proposals must be submitted by email to [contact email address].
  
• Vendors must acknowledge receipt within three business days of issue.
  
• Questions must be submitted in writing by the date listed in A.3.
  
• All communication must go through the designated RFP manager. Direct contact with other [your company] employees during the evaluation period might result in disqualification.
  

A.5 Required submission documents

Each vendor must include the following materials in its submission.

A.6 Evaluation overview

[Your company] will evaluate proposals on seller onboarding speed, payout infrastructure, buyer checkout conversion, global payment coverage, API quality, and vendor reliability. Vendors must demonstrate—with evidence—measurable improvements in seller activation rates, checkout conversion, authorization rates, and operational efficiency. Claims without data will not be scored.

A.7 Vendor acknowledgment

Vendors must complete and return the acknowledgment below within three business days of receiving this RFP.

We acknowledge receipt of the RFP titled “[RFP name]” and confirm our intention ☐ to submit / ☐ not to submit a response.

Company name: ________________________

Authorized representative: ________________________

Title: ________________________

Date: _______

Section B: Overview and scope of work

A vague overview produces generic proposals. Give vendors the specific context they need to respond intelligently: your marketplace model, the markets you serve, your seller mix, and the specific problems you need to solve.

Here’s an example of how this could look.

B.1 Company background

[Your company] operates a [B2B/B2C/C2C] marketplace that connects [describe buyer and seller types] in [insert markets]. We process approximately [X] transactions per month across [X] currencies and currently support [X] active sellers. We invoice [approximate volume] customers per month across [X] currencies. We’re seeking a partner whose platform handles the full money movement stack—buyer checkout, seller onboarding, payout distribution, tax compliance, and reporting—without requiring significant ongoing engineering maintenance.

You can provide additional details to customize:

• Headquarters and key markets
  
• GMV range and transaction volume
  
• Split of domestic vs. cross-border transactions
  
• Internal teams involved (e.g., engineering, finance, legal and compliance, operations, product)
  

B.2 Project’s purpose

This RFP exists to identify a marketplace payment partner that supports the next phase of our growth. Our current infrastructure [describe the gap (e.g., makes sellers wait days for earnings, requires bespoke engineering per market, can’t support AI-initiated commerce)].

Our ideal partner will enable:

• Instant payouts that make sellers choose our marketplace over competitors
  
• An Optimized Checkout Suite that uses AI to recover revenue lost at checkout
  
• Compliant cross-border expansion without requiring new legal entities or payment vendors in each market
  
• A unified platform that replaces point solutions and reduces operational complexity
  
• Infrastructure ready for agentic commerce so AI agents can initiate and complete marketplace transactions on behalf of buyers today
  

B.3 Scope of work

Core deliverables:

• Seller onboarding and identity verification, with same-day activation as the standard
  
• Instant payouts and global payout routing to [insert required countries], with intelligent rail selection per payout
  
• Buyer-side payment acceptance using an Optimized Checkout Suite: AI-powered authorization optimization, dynamic local payment method surfacing across 100+ methods, saved credentials, BNPL, and adaptive pricing for cross-border buyers
  
• Compliant cross-border money movement without requiring per-country legal entities
  
• Automated tax calculation and marketplace reporting
  
• Unified reporting and data access via a single platform, not a patchwork of exports
  
• APIs and tooling that embed all of the above with a single global integration
  

Additional deliverables:

• Stablecoin payout options for sellers in markets where traditional banking rails are slow or inaccessible
  
• Support for the Agentic Commerce Protocol (a defined standard for AI agents to initiate marketplace transactions)
  

B.4 Out-of-scope work

Define what’s excluded so vendors don’t price or assume responsibility for it.

Here are some examples:

• Fraud detection beyond standard marketplace-level controls (handled separately)
  
• Full ERP or general ledger functionality
  
• Customer support tooling unrelated to payments
  

B.5 Desired outcomes

• Same-day seller onboarding and payout readiness rate above [X]%
  
• Checkout conversion improvement of at least [X]% within 90 days of going live (benchmark against the 2%–3% uplift documented in production by leading platforms)
  
• Authorization rate improvement of at least 1%
  
• Payout coverage in [X] countries at launch, with local rail support confirmed
  
• Engineering time to maintain payments infrastructure reduced by [X]%
  

Section C: Proposal instructions

If you don’t specify how you want proposals formatted, you’ll receive everything from five-page summaries to 300-page PDFs. This section standardizes what you receive so you can compare vendors side by side. Proposals that lead with product descriptions rather than production outcomes should score accordingly.

Here’s an example of how this could look.

C.1 Submission format and structure

Each proposal must follow this structure:

• Executive summary (three pages maximum)
  
• Responses to all requirements in Section E, numbered to match
  
• Completed pricing template in Excel
  
• Vendor profile and financial summary
  
• Minimum of three client references from comparable marketplace operators
  
• Supporting documents such as compliance certifications, case studies with production metrics, and API documentation
  

Submissions that deviate significantly or omit required elements might not be evaluated.

C.2 Formatting requirements

• Narrative response as PDF; pricing template as Excel file
  
• Minimum 11pt font, one-inch margins, page numbers
  
• All monetary figures in USD unless otherwise specified
  
• File naming: [Vendor name]–Marketplace–RFP–[Date].pdf
  

C.3 Proposal content guidance

Executive summary

• Lead with measured outcomes from comparable marketplace deployments: seller same-day activation rates, instant payout adoption figures, documented conversion lift from Optimized Checkout Suite, and authorization rate improvements. Don’t describe your product. Show what it produces.
  
• Include your vision for this partnership over three years.
  

Solution overview and architecture

• Describe how your platform handles the full marketplace money movement stack in a single integration. Explain specifically how your AI and ML capabilities drive authorization improvements and checkout conversion.
  
• Describe the data foundation behind your ML models—the number of transactions, breadth of issuer, and market coverage. That foundation determines whether the model works at scale.
  

Agentic commerce

• Describe your current production capabilities for AI agent–initiated transactions. Agentic commerce is a present requirement, not a future road map item; proposals that position it as a forthcoming capability will be scored accordingly.
  

Global coverage

• Specify exactly which markets you support for payment acceptance, seller onboarding, and payouts. Distinguish markets with direct acquiring relationships from those with third-party arrangements. “Supported” means different things depending on who you ask.
  

Security and compliance

• Confirm PCI DSS v4.0 compliance (effective March 2024) and most recent audit date.
  
• Provide 12 months of historical uptime data. The expectation for production-grade marketplace infrastructure is 99.999%+ uptime and a 100% PCI audit success rate.
  

API and developer capabilities

• Provide API latency benchmarks (p50, p95, or p99), uptime history, and your approach to versioning.
  
• Include a link to your developer documentation or sandbox environment.
  

C.4 Clarification and questions

Questions must be submitted in writing by [question deadline] to [RFP manager’s email]. Answers will be distributed simultaneously to all participants. No informal discussions with other [your company] employees are permitted during the process.

C.5 Proposal validity

Proposals must remain valid for 90 days from the submission deadline unless extended by written mutual agreement.

C.6 Right to reject or negotiate

[Your company] reserves the right to reject any proposal, request clarifications, or conduct parallel negotiations with one or more vendors. Participation doesn’t constitute a commitment to purchase.

Section D: Evaluation process

Transparency in scoring pushes vendors to respond with evidence rather than claims. Every criterion below maps directly to requirements in Section E.

Here’s an example of how this could look.

D.1 Evaluation methodology

All proposals will be reviewed by a cross-functional team including engineering, finance, legal and compliance, and operations.

The evaluation runs in three stages:

• Compliance review: Confirm all required documents are present and meet formatting requirements.
  
• Qualitative assessment: Score each submission against weighted criteria using a 1–5 scale (5 = exceptional, backed by production evidence; 1 = fails to meet baseline). A score of 5 requires documented production metrics.
  
• Demonstration and final review: Short-listed vendors present live platform demonstrations. Demos must use a production-parity sandbox, not a scripted walkthrough.
  

D.2 Evaluation criteria and weights

Agentic commerce carries a 10% weight (elevated) because it represents a structural capability gap between vendors that have built for machine-to-machine commerce and those that haven’t. This gap compounds over time.

D.3 Demonstration requirements

Short-listed vendors will demonstrate the following live in a sandbox environment:

• End-to-end seller onboarding (from sign-up to payout-ready status, with KYC completion), targeting same-day activation
  
• Instant payout initiation for a seller, with real confirmation of subminute settlement
  
• Optimized Checkout Suite: dynamic payment method surfacing, saved credential reuse via Link or equivalent, and Authorization Boost in action
  
• Cross-border transaction (buyer in one country, seller in another, and payout in a third currency), handled without manual routing
  
• Agentic Commerce Protocol: an AI agent authenticating and completing a marketplace transaction via API, with full audit logging
  
• Unified reporting dashboard: GMV, payout volume, seller activation rates, authorization rates, and dispute overview
  
• Temporary demo credentials valid for at least 10 business days after the demonstration
  

D.4 Negotiation and contract award

[Your company] reserves the right to conduct clarification sessions, request best-and-final offers, and conduct parallel negotiations. No contract is binding until executed by both parties.

⚑ Evaluator notes—remove before sending to vendors ⚑

• Score independently before group deliberation. A score of 5 requires documented production metrics—not stated capabilities.
  
• Probe global coverage market by market. Ask vendors to confirm direct acquiring relationships vs. third-party arrangements for each market on your list. The distinction matters for authorization rates and costs.
  
• The agentic commerce demonstration is nonnegotiable. Any vendor that cannot show an AI agent completing a transaction in a sandbox today isn’t ready for where your platform is going.
  
• Validate instant payout claims in the sandbox. Ask what percentage of seller payouts settle within 60 seconds in production.
  
• Ask vendors to state the training data footprint for their AI payment models. The breadth of transaction data that underpins ML models is the single biggest differentiator in checkout conversion and authorization performance. It cannot be replicated through engineering alone.
  
• Ask for 12 months of uptime data, not just an SLA. There’s a material difference between 99.900% and 99.999% uptime for a marketplace that runs continuous payments.
  

Section E: Core requirements

This is the most important section. Require factual, evidence-backed responses. Any vendor worth deploying can point to documented outcomes from real deployments. For each requirement, vendors must indicate: Standard (in production today), Configurable (requires setup), Custom (requires development), or N/A.

Here’s an example of how this could look.

E.1 Seller onboarding and identity verification

Seller onboarding is the entry point to your marketplace’s seller retention story. A painful onboarding experience tells sellers what the rest of the relationship will look like, and sellers have options. The benchmark for best-in-class platforms is 91% of sellers completing onboarding and reaching payout-ready status on the same day. That’s the standard to hold your vendor to.

The best vendors also build KYC, AML, and identity verification directly into their platforms so you don’t have to maintain compliance logic yourself. In a regulatory environment that changes constantly across markets, that division of responsibility matters.

E.2 Seller payouts and money movement

Payout speed and flexibility are the primary reasons sellers choose one marketplace over another and some sellers are willing to pay for quicker payouts. That means instant payouts are simultaneously your most powerful seller retention tool and a direct revenue opportunity. Platforms that make sellers wait days for their earnings are losing them to platforms that don’t.

Cross-border payouts are where complexity compounds fastest. The vendor you choose needs to own the routing, compliance, and FX for every market on your list, not hand that responsibility back to you through a patchwork of third-party arrangements.

About 71% of marketplaces that offer instant or real-time payouts are monetizing the feature. For example, 40% of Lyft drivers use Express Pay to access their earnings faster. Payout speed has a direct impact on seller behavior.

E.3 Buyer checkout conversion and the Optimized Checkout Suite

About 40% of marketplaces cite checkout drop-off as a top challenge. Checkout is a revenue problem, not a UX problem. The vendor you choose either has infrastructure that closes the gap or doesn’t.

The Optimized Checkout Suite is the current standard for what best-in-class checkout infrastructure looks like in 2026: AI-powered authorization optimization, dynamic local payment method surfacing across 100+ methods, saved credentials that let returning customers skip re-entry, shared payment tokens that work across sellers on your platform, and adaptive pricing so cross-border buyers see prices in their own currencies. A 2%–3% conversion uplift and a 12% revenue increase from surfacing one additional payment method are documented production outcomes.

Require production conversion data. Any vendor that cannot provide it has told you something important about how confident it is in the performance of its checkout.

E.4 Global expansion and cross-border compliance

Cross-border volume on leading marketplace infrastructure, from all countries, has grown 40% year over year since 2018. As much as 55% of global shopping volume is driven by cross-border purchases. The right infrastructure partner has a global acquiring footprint you can access from Day 1, local payment methods you can turn on without additional integrations, and the compliance infrastructure to handle money movement across markets as a platform capability.

E.5 Platform architecture and API quality

A marketplace payments platform is infrastructure. Evaluate it the way you’d evaluate a database. Uptime history, API performance under load, and the quality of the developer experience determine whether your engineering team spends time building your marketplace or maintaining your payment stack.

E.6 AI and ML capabilities

The ML models behind checkout conversion, authorization optimization, and fraud detection are only as good as the transaction data they’re trained on. The world’s most advanced AI payment foundation model—trained on tens of billions of transactions across markets, issuers, and payment methods—produces materially better outcomes than a model built on a narrower dataset. That’s a compounding advantage that cannot be replicated through engineering effort alone. Ask vendors to describe the data foundations behind their models specifically.

E.7 Developer experience

A payment integration that takes months to build and requires ongoing engineering maintenance to keep stable is a hidden tax on your product team. Your vendor’s developer experience, including its API quality, documentation depth, and sandbox fidelity, determines how much of that tax you pay.

E.8 Connect architecture

For marketplace operators, the account model your vendor uses to represent the relationship between your platform, sellers, and buyers is foundational. It determines what you can build, how fast, and how much maintenance it generates.

E.9 Agentic commerce

AI agents are already initiating commercial transactions by completing purchases, managing seller accounts, and responding to marketplace events on behalf of users. The Agentic Commerce Protocol is the infrastructure standard that safely enables all of this.

Marketplaces that aren’t building for agentic commerce will need to retrofit their infrastructure later, when AI-initiated transactions are a material portion of their volumes. Any vendor that cannot demonstrate agentic commerce flows in a sandbox environment today isn’t ready for where your marketplace is going.

E.10 Stablecoins and emerging payment rails

Stablecoin infrastructure is no longer experimental. The ability to manage stablecoins across 100+ countries, including accepting them from buyers, holding balances, and distributing them to sellers, is a production capability that leading infrastructure providers offer today.

E.11 Operational tooling and reporting

Marketplaces that have consolidated onto a unified payments platform have reported improvements in operational efficiency of up to 50% for some employee roles. Stitching together point solutions feels like flexibility in the short term, but this creates complexity that slows you down over time. Every new integration is another failure mode, reconciliation job, and support escalation path.

E.12 Security, compliance, and data privacy

PCI DSS v4.0 became effective March 2024, replacing v3.2.1 and introducing new requirements for authentication, monitoring, and targeted risk analysis. About 50% of Fortune 100 companies trust their payments infrastructure to leading marketplace platforms. That trust is built on a documented history of compliance. A 100% PCI audit success rate is the standard. Ask vendors whether they meet it.

E.13 Scalability and reliability

For a marketplace, a payment outage is a revenue outage for your platform and every seller on it. Under 44 seconds of downtime per year is the standard for the most reliable platforms in production. Hold vendors to that standard.

E.14 Vendor certification

I hereby certify that all responses are accurate as of the submission date and that capabilities marked Standard or Configurable are currently available in production environments. Claims not supported by documentation or a live demonstration will not be evaluated.

Authorized representative: ________________________

Title: ________________________

Date: _______

⚑ Evaluator notes—remove before sending to vendors ⚑

• A score of 5 on any criterion requires documented production metrics. Stating, “We support this,” without evidence is a 3 at best.
  
• Ask every vendor to describe the training data footprint for its AI payment model in specific terms: number of transactions, years of data, and geographic and issuer breadth. The answer reveals how much of its ML performance is real vs. claimed.
  
• Probe global coverage market by market. For each market on your list, ask whether the vendor holds a direct acquiring relationship or uses a third party, and ask for the authorization rate differential.
  
• The agentic commerce demonstration is a hard requirement, not a bonus. Any vendor that can’t show it in a sandbox today isn’t ready.
  
• Ask for 12 months of historical uptime data and the PCI audit history. The SLA and current status aren’t sufficient.
  
• Verify money transmission license claims against public regulatory filings for your key markets.
  

Section F: Implementation and support

The stakes for a payment migration on a live marketplace are high. Payout delays or checkout downtime during cutover directly affects seller trust and buyer conversion. This section establishes whether the vendor has the methodology to manage that risk.

Here’s an example of how this could look.

F.1 Implementation approach

Vendors must describe:

• Project management framework and how progress is tracked and communicated to [your company]

• Documented time to go live for marketplace operators of comparable scale and geographic complexity with specific examples, not ranges

• How they manage payout continuity during seller account migration, which is when marketplace transitions most often go wrong

• Approach to a parallel run or phased cutover that protects checkout conversion and seller earnings during transition

F.2 Resourcing and governance

Vendors should provide:

• Org chart or RACI chart for the implementation team and confirm whether key roles are in-house or subcontracted

• Named account manager and solutions engineer assigned to this engagement

• Escalation hierarchy and decision-making cadence throughout implementation

F.3 Training and documentation

Vendors should describe:

• Training available for engineering, finance, operations, and customer success teams

• Quality and currency of documentation, since best-in-class platforms maintain documentation that developers prefer over asking support questions

• How documentation is updated as the product ships new capabilities

F.4 Support model and SLAs

Vendors must specify:

• Support tiers and what’s included (e.g., around-the-clock response readiness for a seller payout failure or checkout outage)

• Response time SLAs by severity, with contractual commitments

• How clients are notified during incidents and what the post-incident review process produces

• Historical Severity 1 response time data, not just the SLA

F.5 Continuous improvement

Describe specifically how your platform uses ML and production analytics to improve marketplace outcomes over time. Provide examples with production metrics: authorization rate improvements delivered to existing clients, checkout conversion increases, and payout success rate improvements.

F.6 Vendor attestation

I certify that all implementation and support details are accurate as of the submission date and reflect current production practices.

Authorized representative: ________________________

Title: ________________________

Date: _______

⚑ Evaluator notes—remove before sending to vendors ⚑

• Ask for specific implementation examples from comparable marketplace operators (e.g., GMV range, number of connected sellers, number of markets). Reject ranges.

• Payout continuity during migration is the highest-risk element. Ask for a specific runbook.

• Ask whether the implementation team is the same team that handles postlaunch support. The handoff is often where service quality drops.

• Request historical response times to Severity 1 incidents from the past 12 months.

Section G: Commercials

Marketplace payment pricing is multilayered. Processing fees, payout fees, FX margins, compliance costs, and platform fees can each be structured differently across vendors. Standardize disclosure so you’re comparing real rates, not the headline ones.

Here’s an example of how this could look.

G.1 Pricing structure overview

Vendors must provide:

• Itemized pricing for every component: processing, payouts, FX, compliance, platform fees, agentic API access, and add-ons

• A narrative that explains pricing assumptions with transaction volume, currency mix, payout frequency, and market mix

• Clear identification of minimum monthly commitments or volume thresholds that affect pricing

• All figures in USD with conversion logic if other currencies are quoted

G.2 Pricing components

G.3 Volume sensitivity

Provide estimated total cost at the following GMV levels:

G.4 Contract terms

Vendors must clarify:

• Available contract lengths and pricing incentives for each

• Whether pricing scales down automatically with volume decreases

• Exit clauses and data portability (i.e., how connected seller accounts and transaction histories are returned, in what format, and on what timeline)

• Minimum spend requirements

G.5 Assumptions and dependencies

List all commercial assumptions that underpin your pricing. Unstated assumptions discovered after contract execution might be treated as material misrepresentations.

G.6 Vendor certification

I certify that all pricing and commercial information is complete and accurate as of the submission date.

Authorized representative: ________________________

Date: _______

⚑ Evaluator notes—remove before sending to vendors ⚑

• Reconcile the narrative against the Excel sheet. Discrepancies are a signal.

• FX margins on cross-border payouts compound at scale. Model the total FX cost at your expected cross-border payout volume.

• Data portability for seller accounts is often the real lock-in mechanism. Assess exit terms before you sign, not after.

• Ask vendors to model total cost at 10× your current GMV. The pricing curve over growth matters as much as today’s rate.

Section H: Vendor profile

Your payments infrastructure partner will be an important part of your marketplace’s revenue flow. Understand the company as a whole, including its financial health, engineering depth, rate of improvement, and track record with businesses that look like yours.

Here’s an example of how this could look.

H.1 Company overview

Provide a two- to three-paragraph summary that covers your history, mission, and market position. Focus on your experience with marketplace and platform operators specifically. Describe your track record maintaining compliance as money transmission regulations have changed, along with your history of delivering improvement in AI, stablecoins, and developer tooling ahead of the market.

H.2 Marketplace scale and track record

Provide specific data on your marketplace customer base:

• Number of marketplace platforms on your infrastructure

• Number of connected seller accounts (the current benchmark for scale is more than 10 million connected accounts)

• Markets where marketplace operators use your platform in production today

• Share of top global marketplaces that use your platform (the benchmark for leading infrastructure is 75 of the top 100 global marketplaces)

• Aggregate revenue growth of businesses on your platform vs. benchmark indices (provide documented figures)

H.3 Financial stability

Provide audited financial statements or equivalent evidence of solvency. Private companies should provide a CFO letter that certifies liquidity. Describe your funding structure.

H.4 Certifications and compliance

H.5 Analyst recognition

Provide independent analyst recognition relevant to marketplace payments and billing. The current benchmark for a leading marketplace infrastructure provider is recognition as a Leader across both payments and billing categories. Stripe, the only payments service provider named a Leader in both Forrester Wave evaluations (Merchant Payment Providers, 2024, and Recurring Billing Solutions, Q1 2025), sets the standard. Describe where your platform stands relative to that benchmark.

H.6 Pace of improvement

Describe your product release cadence for the past 12 months, including the number of updates shipped, as well as major capabilities launched in AI, stablecoins, and agentic commerce. The current benchmark for a leading platform is 200+ product updates per year. Explain how your road map for the next 12–18 months continues to invest in the capabilities that matter for marketplace operators.

H.7 Vendor statement of accuracy

I certify that all information in Section H is accurate as of the submission date and that [vendor] has the financial, technical, and operational capacity to perform the described services.

Authorized representative: ________________________

Date: _______

Section I: References

References from comparable marketplace operators are more valuable than any demo. Prioritize references that match your business model, seller mix, and geographic footprint. A vendor that has powered 75 of the top 100 global marketplaces has references that can speak to the full range of marketplace complexity.

Here’s an example of how this could look.

I.1 Reference requirements

Vendors must provide a minimum of three references that meet these criteria:

• Marketplace operator (not a single-merchant business)

• Comparable GMV or seller count to [your company]

• At least one reference with cross-border operations in markets that overlap with yours

• Active customer in production for at least 12 months

I.2 Reference table

I.3 Reference outcome summary

For each reference, provide documented outcomes: seller same-day activation rates, instant payout adoption, checkout conversion improvement, authorization rate lift, or operational efficiency gains. Provide specific figures, not ranges.

I.4 Reference validation

I confirm that each client has consented to serve as a reference and that all information is accurate. [Your company] reserves the right to contact references directly.

Authorized representative: ________________________

Date: _______

⚑ Evaluator notes—remove before sending to vendors ⚑

• Call at least two references by phone. Written summaries are curated by the vendor.

• Ask references specifically whether the same-day onboarding and instant payout metrics in the proposal match what they saw in production.

• Ask about the implementation experience, not just the platform at steady state.

• Ask whether the vendor’s ML-driven checkout and authorization performance claims were substantiated over time.

• Flag generic references from nonmarketplace businesses. They don’t tell you what you need to know.

Section J: Appendixes

J.1 Submission checklist (vendor use)

Attach as the first page of your response packet. Incomplete submissions might be excluded from evaluation.

J.2 Glossary of terms

J.3 Evaluation scoring matrix (internal use)

J.4 Requirements quick-reference checklist

Here’s a checklist for vendor self-assessment before submission.

Seller onboarding and payouts

• Onboarding in three steps or less and documented same-day activation rate from production

• KYC and AML built into the platform—not the marketplace’s responsibility to maintain

• Embeddable onboarding flow—no third-party redirect

• Instant payouts within minutes, at all hours—median settlement time documented

• Global payouts in [required countries] with local rail confirmation

• Stablecoin payouts—first-class capability, 100+ countries

• Multicurrency seller settlement

• Intelligent payout routing (optimal rail per payout)

• Configurable split payment logic without engineering work

• Payout failure retry and fallback—no manual intervention required

Buyer checkout

• Optimized Checkout Suite: unified, AI-powered checkout, documented 2%–3% conversion lift

• Authorization Boost: ML retry, documented >1% authorization rate improvement

• Link or saved credentials—documented conversion uplift, scale of network

• Shared payment tokens: cross-seller credential reuse

• 100+ local payment methods—dynamic surfacing, Q1 2026 list by market

• BNPL available at checkout

• Adaptive pricing in local currency

• 3DS2 with SCA exemption handling

• Mobile-first SDK for iOS and Android

• Fraud detection—false decline rate from production

Global coverage and cross-border compliance

• Payment acceptance in [required markets]—direct acquiring confirmed per market

• Cross-border money movement without new legal entities—licensing structure described

• Money transmission licenses by jurisdiction—complete list provided

• Stablecoin acceptance for buyers—production availability

• Tax automation: 1099-K, VAT, country-specific formats

• OFAC and sanctions screening

• Data residency options

Platform architecture and API

• AI payment foundation model—training data footprint described

• 200+ product updates per year—improvement cadence evidenced

• API latency under 300ms at p99—production figures

• 99.999%+ uptime—12-month historical data, under 44 seconds of downtime per year

• 100% PCI audit success rate—full history

• Full sandbox with production parity including agentic flows

• Versioned API with 12-month deprecation notice

• Standard, Express, and Custom account model support

• Subaccount fund isolation

• Platform-level consolidated reporting

Agentic commerce

• Agentic Commerce Protocol—published standard, documented architecture

• Agentic checkout with stored credentials and scope enforcement

• Granular agent permission scopes enforced at API level

• Immutable audit trail for agent-initiated transactions

• Production-parity sandbox for agentic flow testing

• Stablecoin management across 100+ countries

Operational tooling and reporting

• Unified dashboard—GMV, payouts, activation rates, disputes in one place

• Tax reporting automation by jurisdiction

• Data warehouse export (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift)

• Sigma-equivalent custom SQL access to transaction data

• Role-based access controls

Security and compliance

• PCI DSS v4.0 (effective March 2024)—100% audit success rate

• SOC 2 Type II

• GDPR and CCPA

• KYC and AML maintained across all markets automatically

• Trusted partner of 50% of Fortune 100 companies

J.5 Vendor submission certification

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How Stripe Connect can help

Stripe Connect orchestrates money movement across multiple parties for software platforms and marketplaces. It offers quick onboarding, embedded components, global payouts, and more.

Connect can help you:

• Launch in weeks: Use Stripe-hosted or embedded functionality to go live faster, and avoid the up-front costs and development time usually required for payment facilitation.

• Manage payments at scale: Use tooling and services from Stripe so you don’t have to dedicate extra resources to margin reporting, tax forms, risk, global payment methods, or onboarding compliance.

• Grow globally: Help your users reach more customers worldwide with local payment methods and the ability to easily calculate sales tax, VAT, and GST.

• Build new lines of revenue: Optimize payment revenue by collecting fees on each transaction. Monetize Stripe’s capabilities by enabling in-person payments, instant payouts, sales tax collection, financing, expense cards, and more on your platform.

Learn more about Stripe Connect, or get started today.