With an increasing customer focus on a smooth payment experience, operators and payment providers are stepping up to minimise withdrawal pain points. SBC invited a panel of experts to discuss how this is playing out.
Moderated by 4H Agency’s partner Ivan Kurochkin, the conference included talking points from both the operator’s and the payment provider’s point of view, with the start of the conversation given to panel guest Chris Smart.
Smart is the SVP of Global Gambling at payments provider emerchantpay. He reinstated the importance of having a frictionless experience for the whole chain of payment processing.
“The most important thing from our standpoint is to make sure that our operators and the end consumer have as swift and painless customer experience as possible. We have multiple integration options, multiple payout options and deposit methods.”
Paul Bolton, CEO and Founder of payments consultancy firm Payment Strategy, added to Smart’s comments by saying that, in most cases, opinions throughout the whole payment processing chain often overlap.
“From a consumer point of view, they want everything to be quick, smooth, with as few button clicks as possible, not being taken away from the cashier page,” Bolton noted.
“Anything that adds friction by definition upsets customers. It is a fine line between regulatory requirements, which force friction upon operators and the consumer’s ideal situation where it’s instant gratification essentially.”
Bolton then proceeded to compare examples of cases where regulations may or may not cause pain points for the end consumer depending on the country.
“In the UK and Europe you’ll have PSD2 recently introduced, created very explicitly to cause friction. Supposedly for security as well but the main purpose is to add friction to the customer journey.
“Whereas that doesn’t apply in other markets where Visa and Mastercard are used – North America for example, Canada. It’s a slicker process because there’s no enforced 3DS.”
But while the aforementioned measures were introduced as part of creating better KYC and AML checks, the panel collectively agreed that more investments are needed towards the automatisation of these processes to increase profits and achieve the end goal of true frictionless withdrawals.
David Pope, Marketing Director at Mitech, commented: “It’s about automating that process. You don’t want to be sending lots of emails to the user, you certainly don’t want to have someone calling the customer, and that pain point for the operator is profit. The profit from that enduser is going down the drain when you’re applying human agents.”
Bolton then reinstated: “I think financial institutions and payment rails need to be updated with technology to speed up the process, particularly when there’s regulations which are difficult to adhere to.
“It shouldn’t be difficult for the scheme issuers and acquirers to automate the entire chain. Every party has the information, why is there not a simple yes/no checkbox that can be automated?”
