During a panel discussion at SBC Summit Americas (10-11 June), US gaming officials analysed and explored the traditional, decentralised, options when it comes to achieving a seamless instant payouts experience for customers.
The emerging developments in open banking, instant payments and cryptocurrency have been maturing in the last several years within the traditional finance space.
Crypto regulations are set to come into effect in the UK for the first time in October 2027, while the European Commission is steadily introducing new standards to PSD3 for open banking.
But while the industry continues to push forward, how are some of its classified “high-risk” partners in the gambling space taking to these new developments, especially in a market as volatile as the US?
During a panel discussion at SBC Summit Americas on 11 June, John Parsons, Chief Business Officer for Gaming at Trustly, revealed how open banking is having a transformative effect on gaming operators’ ability to analyse player behaviour over the past five years.
“As we all know, players are promiscuous,” said Parsons. “We’d love to say that they are loyal to one platform, they’re just not, they’re at multiple platforms.
“But when you start weaving together all that behavioral data, when you bring in the banking data that’s available, you can really get a full picture of who this person is, and we can start recommending things, where a customer may be asking for $1 amount that they really shouldn’t be spending.
“We can see they’re going to pay their mortgage on Monday. We can see everything that’s coming into the account, everything that’s leaving the account. We can see that they’ve already spent money on another operator.”
The integration of open banking APIs has also enabled gaming operators to gain insight into payment performance; why a transaction has failed or why the customer experience has certain friction points.
Gaining an insight into friction points using open banking APIs is one thing, but this is futile unless a gaming operator can mitigate this and place a greater emphasis on how different payment methods can make a difference.
Gaming payouts in real-time
The launch of the Real-Time Payment (RTP) network in 2017 was the US’ bid to make payments faster and more accessible, 24/7 across 365 days of the year.
While the Federal Reserve’s FedNow has challenged its status as the definitive US’ instant payment rail, RTP has been adopted by several US gaming operators to make the customer deposit and withdrawal process much more seamless.
“We’re talking about millions of dollars on a daily basis hitting customer bank accounts in under a minute.”
Speaking on the panel at SBC Summit Americas, Alex Ursa, Head of Gaming at Betr, believes RTP’s integration for gaming payments has enabled customers to withdraw money from several days to minutes.
“Payments have transformed a lot over the last six years,” said Ursa. “Six years ago in the US, you would make a deposit, you would pay, you would withdraw, it would take two, three days for someone to review and approve your withdrawal, then it would take another two or three days to get the money in.
“What happened is velocity of funds has transformed from 80% of your money taking a couple of days to hit the customer account, to 90% of the money hitting the bank accounts in under a minute. So, at 95% of withdrawals, we’re talking about millions of dollars on a daily basis hitting customer bank accounts in under a minute.”
Instant payment rails have also become a cost effective alternative to traditional methods, particularly for domestic transactions across the US.
However, when the subject of instant, cost effective payments turned to crypto, one panel member believed that decentralised currencies may become the “holy grail”.
Are stablecoins gaming’s answer for instant payments?
Cryptocurrencies have experienced significant growth in investment, regulation and payment use cases in the US since Donald Trump became President for a second term.
The CLARITY and GENIUS Acts will provide the transparent guidelines and regulations crypto exchanges have been yearning for, enabling them to then provide their infrastructures to clients to onboard crypto and stablecoin payments to their checkouts.
Yet for many within the gaming industry, crypto payments remain more of an idea than a realisation. Leighton Webb, VP and General Manager of igaming and sports betting for PayNearMe, had to clarify why nobody is using Bitcoin for payments and why stablecoins have emerged as the digital currency to transact with.
While many in the gaming industry continue to come to grips with the potential of stablecoin payouts, Webb emphasises once the challenge of fiat-to-stablecoin on/off ramping has been solved for gaming operators, they will become the “holy grail” of instant payments.
“The challenge that I see is the on-ramping to a stablecoin,” said Webb. “But once you do that, I do think that crypto is kind of the holy grail, because of the immediacy of it, the cost of it.”
The key to unlocking fiat-to-stablecoin conversions for gaming operators also opens the door for companies to access greater transparency over treasury management.
Stablecoins enable 24/7 global liquidity, bypassing traditional clearing house cycles to settle in a company’s account in seconds. This in turn, would allow gaming operators the liquidity freedom to perform instant payouts while receiving real-time visibility of when and where the payment lands through the use of blockchain.
This distributed ledger technology continues to provide use cases for traditional finance firms but for operators in the gaming sector, more questions are being asked than answered.
“You really need programmable finance that could be programmed in real-time, and we haven’t even touched on treasury management in terms of the amount of money that is sitting idle,” continued Webb.
“If you had the ability to move that at an instant kind of speed, it would bring down payment costs for sure. The challenge that I see is, how do you get from fiat-to-stablecoin in a way that’s very seamless for the user? And I don’t know what that answer is.”
