A mass payout is one run of the activity described under global mass payments: a business sending money to hundreds or thousands of recipients in a single operation instead of paying them one by one. The main entry covers the industry and its providers; mass payout is the everyday term for the individual run, and for the product feature that payment companies sell under that name.
Typical senders are marketplaces paying sellers, advertising networks paying publishers, platforms paying freelancers and creators, and companies paying rebates, prizes or insurance claims. The sender uploads a file or calls a payout API with a list of recipients, amounts and currencies. The provider runs sanctions screening on each recipient, converts currencies where needed, and delivers each payment over the most suitable payout rail, such as a domestic bank transfer, a card or a wallet.
The term is close in meaning to bulk disbursement, which is more often used for domestic payments by governments, employers and aid agencies, and to batch payout, which describes the technical method of grouping instructions for processing together. A mass payout is usually funded by a single transfer from the sender to the provider before the run begins.