New on Kolsquare: Seamless, efficient creator payments — built for scale, simplicity and compliance

As brands integrate influence further into the marketing mix, influence campaigns that run at scale — activating multiple KOLs to produce multiple contents across a series of interconnected campaigns — are fast becoming the norm. It’s a proven strategy that delivers brands serious impact in hard KPIs. But the flipside, however, is the growing complexity of ensuring KOLs are paid for their work in a professional and timely manner. From contracts that require KOLs to deliver various content pieces intermittently, to international campaigns that run concurrently, managing influencer payments has developed into one of the modern marketer’s major pain points.

Enter Kolsquare’s integrated payment feature, designed to streamline the payment process from campaign planning through to payment. With a minimum of fuss and the click of a button, influencer managers can now authorise KOL payments directly from the platform. Compliance with local tax laws? Tick Up-to-date currency conversions? Tick Happy KOLs paid on time? Tick   

The brains behind Kolsquare payments, Chief Product Officer Michella Saliby and Product Manager Fati Cherkaoui, explain the conception of this new feature, why it was built, what it solves, and how it works in practice.

Why is it important that Kolsquare evolves to include a seamless payments capacity?

Fati Cherkaoui: We’ve seen increasing demand from clients who wanted a more efficient and transparent way to pay influencers — especially as campaigns grew in size and complexity.

Michella Saliby: It’s also a significant step towards making influencer marketing more responsible. With this feature, brands and agencies gain full visibility and control over payments — reducing the risk of influencers not being compensated properly, which was a common issue when third parties handled that process. As more brands prioritise long-term partnerships with KOLs who incarnate the brand, ensuring they are happy and paid on time becomes crucial to success.

What are some of the problems Kolsquare payments solves for influencer marketers?

Fati Cherkaoui: The biggest pain point for brands is compliance. Each country has its own tax and legal requirements, and ensuring payment to influencers meet these standards is time-consuming and complicated. With this feature, Kolsquare — through our partner GigaPay — takes care of compliance, including new regulations like DAC7, which shifts tax reporting responsibility of sellers to platforms.

Michella Saliby: It also helps reduce administrative overhead, which is increasingly onerous and eats into time that could be spent managing and optimising the campaign itself. With Kolsquare payments, influence managers will no longer be spending time on mundane tasks like chasing tax details from KOLs and their agents, acting as intermediaries between KOLs and the accounts department, or handling manual transfers. 

Once the payment task is created in Kolsquare, everything else is automated — notifications, reminders, and payment confirmations — freeing up time for influence managers to spend on defining strategy and building the personal relationships with KOLs that underpin a campaign’s success.

Sorry. What is DAC7?

Fati Cherkaoui: DAC7 is a European directive that aims to improve tax transparency and compliance in the digital world. It applies to sellers to service providers — including influencers and content creators — operating on digital platforms. It’s pretty complicated but basically means that any influencer payment needs to be on the books and compliant with local tax laws.