One of the more intriguing presentations on the Inspiration Stage at INTIX 2026 was “A New, Ethical Approach to Ticket Reselling.” This session featured two executives from menta tech — Chief Revenue Officer Juan Pablo Santa María and Martin Haigh, Senior Vice President of Sales and Business Development — who discussed how primary ticketing platforms can offer a fair, compliant and ethical resale model by embedding fan-to-fan exchanges directly within their systems.

Attendees also learned how content-owner-defined rules, such as price caps and identity checks, can be enforced invisibly by infrastructure and not outsourced to external marketplaces. The goals are threefold: 1) a seamless experience for fans; 2) a new revenue stream for all stakeholders; and 3) a trusted environment that satisfies regulators and rights holders alike.

Santa Maria comments, “One of the most significant shifts happening in ticketing right now is that control and fairness no longer have to live in policy documents, manual processes or third-party enforcement. They can be embedded directly into the resale system's operational logic, applied automatically, consistently and at scale.”

Best Design

Indeed, a well-designed engine allows platforms to set maximum and minimum resale prices, as well as control listing and purchase eligibility; define time windows for when resale opens and closes; and apply different configurations by event, venue, territory or ticket type. “Those rules run as infrastructure,” Santa Maria states. “They do not require human review on individual transactions. The same applies to seller controls.”

In getting started, the first step platforms need to take in embedding fan-to-fan exchanges within their systems is a strategic choice, not a technical one. Platforms need to decide what kind of secondary market they want to create. Haigh says, “This question is more consequential than it sounds. A white-label, native integration inside the primary ecosystem is a fundamentally different proposition from a third-party partnership or a simple listing tool. Each carries different implications for brand ownership, data control, pricing authority and the long-term fan relationship. Getting this wrong early makes everything harder to correct later.”

Over the years, Haigh has noticed that ticketing platforms make five common mistakes when they first introduce resale. The first and most consistent one is “treating resale as a feature rather than a market design decision,” he says. The second mistake is deferring policy decisions, while the third is underestimating ticket validity and settlement. The fourth is failing to distinguish genuine fan-to-fan exchange from organized commercial activity.

He states, “The fifth, and often the least discussed, is treating launch as the objective. Resale requires ongoing governance: rule adjustment, monitoring, operational response to edge cases. Platforms that build for launch without planning for operation discover this the hard way, usually when volume increases, a regulation changes or an edge case the system wasn't designed for becomes a recurring incident.”

The Long Arm of the New Laws

Meanwhile, new varying global laws and regulations are pushing the industry toward integrated resale. Ticketing platforms want to lead that shift instead of constantly reacting to it.

Iñaki Sanchez Lopez, co-founder and CEO of menta tech, observes that regulation is moving faster than many platforms have anticipated and in a consistent direction. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the government announced in November 2025 its intention to make resale above original ticket cost illegal, with penalties reaching up to 10% of global turnover under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission took action in August 2025 against resellers using automated tools to bypass primary-sale ticket-limit controls.

Sanchez Lopez remarks, “This is not isolated policy activity. It reflects a structural shift in how governments are approaching live event access, price transparency and platform responsibility. The direction is clear. Resale needs to be traceable, fair and linked to the verified identity of the original buyer.”

He continues, “Platforms that wait for regulation to land will find themselves retrofitting compliance into systems that were never designed for it, under time pressure, at cost and during a period of heightened public and regulatory attention. The technical debt is real, and the reputational exposure during that transition is not trivial.”

By contrast, platforms that act now are in an entirely different position. By embedding official resale natively with configurable pricing rules, seller controls and a full audit trail, they are compliant by design from the moment new rules come into force. “They are not reacting,” Sanchez Lopez says. “The infrastructure already reflects the policy.”

A well-designed resale system makes genuine fan-to-fan exchange easy, official and safe, while making industrialized abuse structurally harder to execute at scale. Price caps, identity-linked seller controls, listing limits, payout verification and audit trails are the mechanisms. Sanchez Lopez states, “They are not in tension with the fan. They are what allows the fan to trust the system.”

All three interviewees expressed pride in how their company, menta tech, provides the full infrastructure layer for official fan-to-fan resale, embedded natively within the primary ticketing platform as a white-label system. Haigh says, “Resale runs under the platform's brand, within the platform's environment, according to rules the platform or promoter defines. The fan never leaves the ecosystem. The data never leaves the ecosystem. The revenue doesn't leave either. What menta handles operationally is significant: buyer and seller flows, ticket validity and transfer mechanics, financial operations including payment collection, payout orchestration, settlement and reconciliation.”

The practical effect for a ticketing company is this: they can launch a fully governed official secondary market without building or operating any of that complexity internally. Engineering resources stay focused on the core product. “Compliance is managed at the transaction level across markets,” Haigh notes, “and a revenue stream that previously flowed to external platforms, resale commissions, now stays inside the ecosystem.”

The fact menta tech was built and continues to be run by ticketing experts gives it a certain competitive advantage when working with today's ticketing professionals. Sanchez Lopez calls it a “foundational advantage. Not because it makes for a smoother sales conversation, though it does. But because it shaped what we built. The team behind the product worked inside ticketing platforms and live event operations before a line of product code was written. That means we have operated resale in real conditions: at volume, under demand spikes, across different regulatory contexts, and through the kinds of edge cases that don't appear in a product specification but do appear in production.”

Getting back to the INTIX 2026 Inspiration Stage presentation, the exit question was asked: How important is it for today's ticketing platforms to offer a fair and ethical resale model?” Sanchez Lopez was quick to answer. “A fair and ethical resale model addresses the root cause, not just the symptoms,” he says. “It is not the whole answer. Better fan education, clearer law, and meaningful enforcement all matter. But it is the part that platforms can control directly. Done properly, official resale inside the primary platform protects the fan, preserves the organizer's authority over their event, and captures value that currently flows to third parties.”

He concludes, “The platforms that understand this are not treating resale as a feature to add. They are treating it as infrastructure that shapes the entire ticket lifecycle.”