Simplifying the Payments Infrastructure at a High-Growth Gig Platform

“Is your gig platform ready to handle the next wave of regulatory requirements?”

How secure is your payment infrastructure as you scale globally?”

“Do you have a backup plan if your PSP fails?”

The gig economy is currently valued at $556 billion and is expected to rapidly grow at a compounded annual rate of 15%. By 2027, over 50% of the US workforce will likely participate in the gig economy. Globally, a whopping 88% of the gig economy gross volume comes from ride-sharing platforms like Uber and asset-sharing platforms like Airbnb.

As the gig economy keeps growing, gig platforms face increased payment infrastructure challenges. Security, scalability, and compliance are more important than ever to ensure gig workers and customers have reliable, flexible, and secure payment experiences.

Large global enterprises—especially those in categories similar to Uber and Airbnb—must pay gig workers across many regions and chosen payment methods while securing their sensitive payment data and protecting against data breaches. Given that almost 75% of gig workers would consider leaving their current freelancer marketplaces for better payment experiences and that 1 billion data records were stolen in 2024, a focus on maximizing payment options while ensuring security is critical.

From our work with gig platforms, we have solved a few of their shared challenges:

• Higher vulnerability to data breaches and fraud risk
• Scalable infrastructure that can match the growth rate
• Managing the complexity of dual-pronged loyalty programs
• Need for real-time analytics and adaptability

Higher vulnerability to data breaches and fraud risk

Gig marketplaces handle high volumes of Card-Not-Present (CNP) online transactions, whether delivering a ride from a Lyft app or a restaurant order from Grubhub. CNP fraud losses in the US have doubled in the last five years to $10 billion in 2024, accounting for 74% of all card payment fraud losses.

The enormous databases of gig platforms containing double the sensitive payment information - of not just the payor (the purchaser) but the payee (the gig worker)- increase their data security and fraud risk. Securing their data with an independent token vault can dramatically lower this risk.

As we saw above, gig platforms are in a high-growth phase and need scalable infrastructure like flexible onboarding solutions and consolidated API integrations, such as from our Card Management Platform, to fit their rapid expansion needs.

Managing the complexity of dual-pronged loyalty programs

Sophisticated marketplace loyalty programs, such as those from Amazon and Uber, incentivize both buyers and sellers. Examples are Uber Rewards for buyers and Uber Pro for drivers, and Amazon Prime for buyers with Amazon Seller Rewards for sellers. Although attractive to the intended audience and an engagement tool for the merchant, more expansive programs also expand the need to operate on sensitive data.

If merchants hold this data on their systems, they will most likely be in scope for PCI compliance. Given the size of their databases and the intensive efforts to achieve and maintain annual compliance, merchants may find themselves dedicating a fair amount of effort, resources, and funds just to secure the data for their loyalty programs - instead of reaping their business benefits. Our PCI Compliance solution enables organizations to achieve new requirements like PCI DSS v4.0, or get PCI-compliant with a new business, while securely operating on sensitive data without ever touching it.

Real-time analytics and adaptability

In its most simple definition, gig marketplaces provide a unified platform to match supply with demand. This can be for car rides, grocery orders, a dog watcher from Rover, or a handyman from TaskRabbit. However, supply and demand don't always match, making dynamic pricing models especially popular at gig platforms.

Organizations that use real-time data to understand delivery routes or purchase patterns can reduce costs by as much as 15%. Not adapting their experience with real-time analytics can risk losing as many as 88% of users who are less likely to return after a poor experience. Our Account Updater service provides real-time payment information to ensure gig platforms have the most up-to-date card credentials on file for every transaction, ensuring its success and enhancing the user experience.

 

Case Studies

Case Study 1: LATAM Super-App

Rappi is a multi-billion dollar Latin American company with a super-app that delivers numerous products and services. Rappi users use a single app to access the most fashionable restaurants, the largest food chains, pharmacies, and supermarkets. Operating across multiple regions, payment types, and user preferences has enabled Rappi's impressive growth while creating a complex payment infrastructure.

VGS enabled Rappi to address the inherent inefficiency of operating localized payment systems in every region. Rappi used VGS as its core vault to centralize card data, simplifying payment processes across regions. Instead of being beholden to individual vendor roadmaps, Rappi could implement its tailored payment strategy to push payments across direct processors and orchestrators and quickly expand across markets.

Besides achieving the cost efficiency of having VGS as a central location for all sensitive card information, Rappi also added processing redundancy. With VGS, it had the failover protection of automatically routing traffic to a backup processor to avoid failed transactions and continue selling without interruptions.

Case Study 2: Global Ridesharing Platform

One of our gig economy customers is a multi-service platform operating primarily in Asia and Africa. They have been with VGS since 2019. As a business, they got their start in ridesharing and expanded to various on-demand solutions. Operating multiple business lines across regions - while accepting a massive amount of varied card payments - created a need for top-notch data security and cost optimization.

VGS provided an independent token vault to store sensitive data - enabling our customer to own and operate on the data in tokenized form without taking on the liability of touching PCI card data. A central location for their card data also allowed our customer to implement their pre-defined payment orchestration strategy seamlessly. They could route each transaction from their vault to the lowest-cost processor based on card type, transaction amount, and geography in order to reduce payment processing fees.

Case Study 3: North American On-Demand Restaurant Delivery

An online door ordering and food delivery app with its most extensive footprint in the US and Canada needed to ensure that it protected the PII (name, birthdate, SSN, address, etc.) of its large force of delivery contractors. Securing this data was critical since a data breach carried the risk of reputational damage, contractor churn, and legal and financial consequences.

The VGS vaulting solution secures all sensitive data in token form - beyond just PCI card data. Since 2020, our customer has trusted VGS to keep 200M+ PII and PCI records safe. VGS tokenizes and stores these in a vault to provide our customer with peace of mind and an uninterrupted focus on core business activities.

Storing these in a central PCI-compliant vault simplifies our customer's compliance requirements. VGS reduces the burden of managing this data while ensuring our customer still controls it. Not only did this well-known food delivery app secure its sensitive data by storing it in a VGS token vault, but owning it - instead of holding it with a PSP - significantly increased data utility.