How does Lumanu compare to PayPal Payouts?

Why build complex compliance and treasury logic on a generalist API? Lumanu's specialized Creator Payout API is ready out-of-the-box. Lumanu drastically reduces your development time and support overhead.

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our unique value

General Purpose
vs. Creator Specific

Features

Lumanu (Creator Specialist)

Lumanu (Creator Specialist)

PayPal Payouts (Generalist Payout API)

Money Flow & Treasury

Flexible Wallet System. Easily generate finance-ready invoices to fund dedicated Lumanu accounts. Our wallet supports platforms whether you are in or out of the money flow (MoR).

Funding Limit and Balance Hold Risk. Payments are typically funded only by your PayPal balance, requiring constant management and exposing your platform to potential account holds or reserves.

Global Payments & Reliability

High Payout Success. We use multiple banking relationships and localized rails, ensuring creators withdraw in their currency with high success rates.

Limited Payout Options and High FX Fees. Payouts are limited to recipients with a PayPal account only. Recipients must open an account, and are exposed to higher currency conversion fees.

Creator Management

Lumanu’s payment network was built to give creators a frictionless experience, with native support for complex entities like Loan-Out Companies and Agencies.

No Creator-Specific Compliance. PayPal offers general mass payments without built-in support for talent agents and managers.

Support

White-glove support from a team of experts who understand the creator economy. We provide dedicated support to both you and your creators.

Generic support. The platform is the first line of defense for non-core issues like payout failures and frozen accounts.

Meet with Lumanu

Meet with Lumanu

General payment APIs

Onboarding & Compliance

Lumanu handles all vendor onboarding, compliance checks, and tax form collection.

You are responsible for building an onboarding flow and collecting and verifying W-9s/W-8BENs, and managing 1099s.

Money Flow

Flexible money flow is tailored to support your needs. Choose how your customers fund dedicated wallets.

Rigid, one-size-fits-all money flow requirements that don't adapt to your business model.

Global Payments

Fund in your customers' currencies, pay out to 180+ countries. Creators can withdraw in their local currency with local rails and cost-effective conversion rates.

Complex setup requiring regional entities (Stripe Connect) or high, often hidden, currency conversion fees passed on to recipients (PayPal).

Creator Experience

Lumanu's payment network was built to give creators a frictionless experience.

A fragmented and confusing experience for creators, who have to navigate multiple platforms and redundant information requests.

Support

White-glove support from a team of experts who understand the creator economy. We provide dedicated support to both you and your creators.

Generic support that doesn't understand the nuances of the creator economy. You and your creators are left to fend for yourselves.

Why Lumanu?

Engineering Simplicity, Built-in Support and Compliance.

Skip expensive custom development and maintenance. Lumanu helps you achieve lower operating costs and reduce engineering time spent on payment infrastructure support and maintenance.

Flexible Funding Process

The Problem: Large-scale influencer and affiliate payments require an auditable, invoice-backed funding process. PayPal's system requires manually pre-funding a balance, which complicates reconciliation, increases operational risk from funding delays, and exposes your platform to PayPal account holds.

The Lumanu Solution: Streamline your treasury operations. Easily generate finance-ready invoices for direct funding of dedicated Lumanu accounts. Our native wallet system provides the flexibility to support platforms IN or OUT of the money flow (MOR), ensuring compliant reconciliation.

Payouts built for platforms

The Problem: PayPal's API is built for simple mass payments. It lacks the metadata and ledger structure required for granular reconciliation, tracking balances across customers, or providing robust reporting and analytics.

The Lumanu Solution: Lumanu's API was purpose-built for the creator economy, supporting influencers, affiliates, and complex client structures at scale. We are a plug-and-play solution that understands the needs of agencies and brands, saving your team engineering and support time.

Global Payouts, lower fees

The Problem: Payout failures due to limited country support. Debugging manual failures and resolving payout issues consumes significant support and engineering time.

The Lumanu Solution: Drastically reduce support overhead with superior global coverage and dedicated creator support. We offer comprehensive, out-of-the-box payout options (including PayPal) and local banking rails for high success rates. We handle all Tier 1/2 creator support and issue resolution, freeing your team completely.

Support

Dedicated support

The Problem: PayPal support often means days or weeks of waiting to resolve issues. Platform accounts are at risk of being temporarily frozen, directly halting your critical payment operations.

The Lumanu Solution: Lumanu provides dedicated, white-glove support for your platform, brands, agencies, and creators. You and your vendors interact with a real person for quick, expert resolution of any issue, ensuring your payment operations remain uninterrupted.

Your Payments Roadmap, Accelerated.

Our flexible, straightforward REST API provides the building blocks you need to create a sophisticated, compliant payment system that feels native to your platform. Without the burden of building it from scratch.

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Execute Complex Payouts with a Single API Call

Stop managing complex state machines for payments. With Lumanu, you can initiate a payment with a single API call. We handle the multi-step branching logic, from compliance checks to payment method execution automatically. You tell us who to pay, and we make it happen.

Abstract away the complexity of compliance, onboarding, and payment execution into a single API call.

{
  "email": "example@creator.com",
  "amount": "500.00",
  "currency": "<ISO_CURRENCY_CODE>

{
  "email": "example@creator.com",
  "amount": "500.00",
  "currency": "<ISO_CURRENCY_CODE>

Offload PII & Compliance, Not Control

Drastically reduce your compliance overhead and security scope. Lumanu can handle the entire vendor onboarding process, collecting sensitive PII, tax forms (W-9/W-8BEN), and bank details through our secure, hosted flows. If you already have the data, you can pass it to us. It’s a flexible, hybrid approach that lets you control the user experience without taking on the risk.

Leverage our pre-built banking relationships and compliance engine to launch in days, not months.

Build Event-Driven Workflows with Webhooks

Eliminate the need for constant polling and status-checking logic in your codebase. Lumanu pushes real-time updates directly to your application for events like payment status changes, vendor onboarding completion, and account balance updates.

Focus on building your core product, not on tracking payment states or ledger balances.

Developer Resources:

Everything You Need to Build with Confidence.

📖

Comprehensive API Docs

Clear, actionable guides and a complete API reference.

⭐

Full-Featured Sandbox

Test your entire workflow.

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Dedicated Developer Support

Expert hands on guidance from integration to launch.

FAQ

Your top questions, answered

How does Lumanu's support model for creators differ from that provided by PayPal Payouts?

What is the core problem with using PayPal Payouts for reconciliation and reporting?

Why is Lumanu's native wallet system better than funding a PayPal balance?

What risk does PayPal's payment method pose to my platform's reliability?

Can PayPal Payouts easily support Loan-Out Corporations and complex creator entities?