[jareau]

(Balanced employee)

A lot of the successful marketplaces these days (e.g. Airbnb) have decided to fully intermediate the payments on their platform for security reasons. They find escrow is a way to promote trust and security on their platform. Most third-party payment platforms don't allow for this. Even eBay, which uses the most popular 3rd party payments platform of all (PayPal) had to initiate a $5000 "PayPayl guarantee" to encourage sales. Other marketplaces, like Etsy, are moving away from PayPal and building their own intermediated payments system to have a similar experience as Airbnb. My understanding is that Stripe Connect is great for store builders like Shopify, which are disaggregated, but less attractive to marketplaces like Airbnb.