Ultimately, underlying all this, is a broken financial setup. At least I suspect so.
Transaction fees, liability, and regulatory-ish obligations are very high. The last one has been getting worse as "anti money laundering" standards are being beefed up to make financing terrorism & tax evasion (also money laundering to an extent) more difficult. It all results in weird rules and policies followed without a good understanding of why they exist. It's even hard to tell who's policy they, regulators/legislature or the companies themselves.
The whole thing has choke points (eg CC transactions) controlled by tiny oligopolies.
Anyone handling money-in-money-out from lots of parties ends up bureaucratic and skittish. Fraud, chargebacks and such are generally a big problem. On top of that there is always an incentive to screw around. For example, the average number of days between payment and withdrawal multiplied by daily transactions is a sum of money sitting permanently in freelancer's vaults. That spread also reduces all sorts of chargeback and fraud risks.
Anyway, all this boils down to a reality where no one but financial institutions can do a decent job of handling other people's money. Freelancer is handling this guy's money. His "salary" goes into a freelancer account. We've seen this problem a lot in startupland. Paypal, even though they are financial institutions. Ironically, the bitcoin exchange world and the MtGox thing. The online poker crisis of 2006...
It's a problem.