How Better Payments Became a Winning Move in Gaming

In the early days of regulated online gaming in the United States, payments were less a utility than a bottleneck.

Seven years ago, as states like New Jersey began legalizing digital wagering, operators faced a paradox: consumer demand was surging, but the financial infrastructure needed to support it was fragmented, unreliable and often hostile.

“Debit card was not readily accessible. A lot of the banks were blocking MCC codes. There were a lot of issues going on,” John Parsons, chief business officer, gaming at Trustly, told PYMNTS.

What emerged across the industry was a patchwork of workaround solutions spanning aggregators, manual bank entry and clunky verification flows. And what these workarounds did was expose a deeper disconnect between financial systems and the behavior of modern users.

That disconnect is still being solved for today. And it’s why, as digital payments continue to evolve, the gaming industry’s own path could offer a glimpse into a broader transformation.

Overcoming Early Challenges

Online gaming, by its nature, occurs in real-time and is emotionally driven. A delay of even minutes can mean the difference between engagement and abandonment. Yet many payment methods of the time were built for slower, more deliberate transactions.

What Parsons and his team recognized was that the problem wasn’t simply access to funds; it was a lack of intelligence in the payment layer.

“With a card, you get a binary decision back, yes or no,” he said. “There’s very little else to go off of.”

By contrast, direct connections to bank accounts opened up a richer data environment, one that could fundamentally reshape how operators understood and served their customers.

“There’s so much rich data about the individual residing in their bank account,” Parsons said. “What are their spending habits? What is their income? All sorts of things that you can parse out.”

That insight enabled a critical leap: the ability to guarantee transactions in a high-risk category where settlement delays were the norm. Gaming activity peaks on weekends, but ACH payments typically settle during banking hours. By leveraging real-time data from bank accounts, Trustly was able to underwrite that risk instantly.

“We were able to fully guarantee it because of the amount of information we had about the player,” Parsons said.

Beyond speed, the next frontier was access. Debit cards, while ubiquitous, came with built-in constraints — daily limits, fraud triggers and a general conservatism ill-suited to high-value gaming transactions.

By enabling direct bank access, payment providers could unlock a broader range of liquidity while maintaining control through data-driven risk models. The result was not just higher transaction volumes, but a more seamless user experience — one that aligned with the expectations of a digitally native audience.

Data as Competitive Advantage

The future of transactions is not just faster or more secure, but more intelligent. In that intelligence lies the next wave of competitive advantage.

“A couple years ago, we introduced RTP [real-time payments], instant withdrawals back to your bank account in 15 seconds,” Parsons said, noting that the psychological impact of that capability is as important as the functional one. “In the consumer’s mind, you would think the technology exists that says, oh, instant in, instant out.”

Delivering on that expectation builds trust, something particularly valuable as the online gaming industry conversation shifts from growth to sustainability.

Here again, data becomes the differentiator. By analyzing transaction histories and behavioral patterns, operators can segment users more effectively and tailor their strategies accordingly.

“They’re so hungry for data to understand, when John shows up as a brand-new player, what do I do? Is he a $10-a-week kind of guy, or a $100,000-a-week?” Parsons said.

Payments, in this context, are no longer just a back-end function. They are a primary source of insight when aggregated and anonymized, and can inform acquisition strategies, risk models and customer retention efforts.

“You’re able to match the data up to other consumers and start bucketing behaviors. This consumer is like this one, this consumer has the potential to do that,” Parsons said. “We can look into the bank account, aggregate that data and give our partners actionable information. They can’t get this information anywhere else.”

Future of Casino Payments

But while online gaming has led the charge in payment innovation, the physical casino industry remains largely analog.

“You’re sitting there having a good time, and you run out of cash, and there’s a line of 10 to 15 people at the ATM,” Parsons said. “It becomes this stressor when a consumer is trying to have fun.”

The solution, again, could lie in bridging the gap between financial infrastructure and user behavior. By extending bank-connected payment systems into physical venues via technologies like scan-and-pay, operators can eliminate cash without sacrificing security or speed.

“It’s taking what we’ve been successful with online and then bringing it to the physical space,” Parsons said.