How Petbnb built trust into pet-sitting bookings with OPP Escrow and verified sitters

Petbnb, a Dutch platform that matches pet owners with trusted pet sitters, worked with OPP to make every booking safe for both sides. Pet owners could pay with iDEAL and PayPal, OPP Escrow held each payment until the stay was over, and every sitter was verified through OPP’s KYC checks. The integration took about a week.

Going on holiday is easy. Finding someone you trust with your dog or cat is not. Petbnb connects pet owners with sitters who look after animals in their own homes. Founded in the Netherlands in 2016, it went on to expand to Germany and Belgium, and at the time of this partnership it connected 200,000 pet lovers and processed thousands of payments a month. Trust is the whole product, and payments are where trust gets tested.

The partnership: automated, scalable payments for a trust-based marketplace

Petbnb came to OPP a year after launch. It needed payments that were automated, easy to scale and safe for both sides of a booking, and it wanted more ways to pay than a bank transfer. OPP set up iDEAL and PayPal, put Escrow underneath every booking and took on the verification of sitters. From then on, changes in regulation landed at OPP rather than at Petbnb.

The challenge: manual payments and money the platform should not be holding

In its first months, Petbnb handled the payments between owners and sitters by hand. With a modest user base and no PSD2 yet, that seemed logical. As the platform grew, it became too much to handle, and it left Petbnb holding and managing its customers’ money itself. iDEAL was the payment method Dutch users expected, and co-founder Nicholas Latham wanted to add PayPal as well. Only a year after its launch, Petbnb decided it was time to automate, scale and extend its payment options.

Our solution: iDEAL between private individuals, Escrow and KYC, live within a week

Petbnb’s pet owners and sitters are private individuals, so the platform needed a way for one consumer to pay another. OPP offered exactly that: consumer-to-consumer iDEAL payments, known as C2C iDEAL. OPP was the first certified provider of C2C iDEAL payments in the Netherlands, and Petbnb was the first platform to use them. The implementation took about a week.

Underneath the booking flow sat OPP Escrow: the owner’s payment was held in a third-party account, and the sitter was paid once the terms of the booking were met. Sitters also got their own dashboard to follow their transactions and earnings.

“As this kind of service is all about trust, we need to make the whole booking process as smooth as possible and need to reduce any fears people might have of things that might go wrong. Needless to say, payments are an incremental part of this process. From that perspective, the fact that OPP is supporting us with escrow payments is important.”

Nicholas Latham, Co-founder of Petbnb

Two years into the partnership, PSD2 came into effect. Petbnb did not have to change anything: because its payments already ran through OPP, it was compliant from day one. The same went for other regulation such as DAC7 and GDPR, and for the personal data Petbnb did not have to store because OPP held it.

OPP also built KYC checks into Petbnb’s user onboarding and could onboard users anywhere in the European Economic Area. When a sitter changed bank account without verifying it, OPP was notified automatically and took care of the check, which mattered as much for fraud risk as for trust.

The impact: a payment flow that grew with the platform

In the two years before this story was written, Petbnb doubled in its existing markets. It was adding services with third parties, such as grooming and training, and had international expansion on its radar. Trust takes time to build in a new country; payments do not. With OPP, setting up payments for a new market could be done in a day.

What this means for you: why service marketplaces need Escrow and verified users

If you run a marketplace where one person pays another for a service that happens later, Petbnb’s early set-up is probably familiar: payments handled by hand, money sitting with the platform, and a compliance bar that keeps rising.

A licensed payment partner takes that off your plate. Escrow holds the payment until the service is delivered, KYC keeps the user base verified, and regulation such as PSD2 and DAC7 becomes the provider’s job instead of yours.

Want to see how Escrow and verified onboarding could work for your platform? Get in touch to learn more.