iGaming at the cutting edge of payments

Since 1994, when the first online casino opened, the market for online gambling has developed in a remarkable way. According to Juniper Research, online gamblers will wager nearly 700 billion dollars in 2018. In 2022 that number is expected to reach over one trillion dollars.

One key driver of this growth is that iGaming companies have been very good at adopting and utilizing new technology. The industry was at the forefront when it came to mobile interfaces and many iGaming companies are also now investing heavily in cutting-edge VR technology in order to improve their customers gaming experience. One of the most exciting areas where iGaming companies have been the frontrunners in innovation is online payments.

Gaming payments need flexibility
Since our clients operate on such an intensely competitive market, with many operators offering similar services, smooth pay-ins and pay-outs have become an important competitive tool to keep customers loyal. As many of these companies now operate in a global market, it is also important that they are able to accept a wide variety of local payment methods that fulfill customer preferences in different countries. In order to deal with this complexity, iGaming companies have invested a lot in advanced payment systems focused on speed and flexibility.

At Bambora, we have gathered extensive expertise when it comes to these kinds of payment systems, which handle large transaction volumes on an international market. Our solution PaymentIQ makes it possible for iGaming companies to accept over 250 different payment methods and to increase their acceptance rates through intelligent transaction and failover routing. PaymentIQ also operates in conjunction with our automated reconciliation tool AccountIQ that matches and syncs those payment flows across multiple currencies.

With the importance of information security never far from the minds of our clients, we provide a third product, VaultIQ, that ensures all card data is tokenized and stored in line with the latest PCI DSS* requirements. This means that companies using PaymentIQ for their payments are able to route to any acquirer of choice without being tied to one payment service provider, all while remaining outside of the scope of the most onerous PCI requirements themselves.

A new trend shaping the industry
These different payment solutions have all been developed to solve the very specific challenges of the iGaming industry. With them, Bambora has created a payment ecosystem that helps iGaming companies accept more payment types and do so in a safer way, which has helped some of the industry’s leading companies to grow. Now, however, we are in the midst of a new payment trend that we think will shape the iGaming industry in years to come.

According to Christer Wikman at Bambora, the boundaries between user accounts and payments have been dissolving in iGaming over the past few years. As a result, certain operators have been able to win market share by offering a gaming experience that doesn’t require the player to register an account.

“These operators instead allow their players to use an electronic ID, like Sweden’s BankID, to make transfers without having to first register an account. This doesn’t just make it easier for the players but it also helps protect the companies from fraud, since the players are identifying themselves electronically”, says Christer Wikman.

At Bambora, we have now developed our own solution, called 1-Click KYC, to meet this new demand. By using it, our customers can allow their players to bypass the traditional registration process, and play instantly by using electronic IDs from many different countries.

Christer Wikman explains that Bambora’s offer to the iGaming industry is taking a step into the future with this new product. Offering secure, flexible and easy-to-use payment alternatives has always been at Bambora’s core, and by combining products like PaymentIQ with 1-Click KYC we add yet another level of ease, flexibility and security, benefitting both our clients and their customers.

“As experts on payment for gaming, we know what a difference a smart payment solution can make to the profitability and growth of our customers, which is why we are always working on providing our clients with the most cutting-edge solutions at the forefront of current technological trends”, says Christer Wikman.

* The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is an extensive set of rules and processes that are mandated for all companies that handle credit card information. By using VaultIQ, iGaming companies are not required to comply with the rigorous processes of the PCI DSS since they are issued tokens instead of handling the actual card data.