Payments Are the Lifeblood: How Friction in Deposits and Withdrawals Destroys Loyalty

Payment processing is the lifeblood of iGaming, shaping how deposits and withdrawals are handled across platforms, but the day-to-day reality for operators is rarely “plug in a few methods, and you’re done.” Even when you offer the same payment methods across multiple markets and payment providers, the player experience can change from provider to provider—different interfaces, different steps, different points of failure. That inconsistency creates friction, and friction is not a minor UX issue in gambling. Players have a low tolerance for anything that feels confusing or slow when moving money, and switching to a competitor is always one click away. Let’s dive in and see what experts have to say on this matter.

The Best Payment Flow Goes Unnoticed

“Players want frictionless experiences that mirror their journeys from everyday life, from e-commerce and so on. They want a straightforward, seamless payment flow with as few steps as possible.” Sounds simple, right?

But that’s not always the case in the gambling industry. As payments expert Ivan Voitenko, GR8 Tech’s group product manager, explains, banking access and payment friction can be serious pain points for operators across every market.

So what are the main problems with payment providers when it comes to online casinos and sportsbooks?

“The biggest issue is fragmentation and lack of consistency,” explains Voitenko.
“Even with the same payment method, different providers can offer their own user interfaces, their own flows. It's hard to handle when we offer the players some payment methods, and they are expecting a familiar payment flow, but then they've been redirected to the payment providers, and we offer something different from what they are used to. 

“Sometimes it happens that we balance between payment providers, and one time we offer one payment provider, but the next time it will be a different one, and it's sometimes confusing even for us, when we've seen such different payment flows.

 “We're trying to deliver a unified branded payment experience, but it's one of the biggest issues. From our perspective, we're fighting for host-to-host interactions with payment providers.”

Undoubtedly, consumer behavior drives expectations for the payment experience across industries. If, for example, people are seeing slicker, more intuitive experiences for their everyday banking and finance needs, then it follows they’ll expect the same in the gaming industry. 

As Ashley Lang, CEO of Pragmatic Solutions, puts it: “Payment processing is the lifeblood of the gaming industry.”

He elaborates: “Players have low tolerance for friction or frustration, particularly when it comes to non-entertainment aspects of their interaction with the operator. If it's as simple as a click to go to another competitor in the industry, players are going to have a very low tolerance for aspects of their onboarding or their access to the product that introduces friction - if it doesn't have something to do with the gameplay itself.

Unpacking Low Player Loyalty

Lang continues: “If it's hard to make deposits and withdrawals of your iGaming business, then players will take their business elsewhere. It's not difficult for them to go across the street virtually, right? So the solution is to offer a variety of payment options, optimize player payment journeys, remove bottlenecks, and process requests as quickly as possible, including instant payouts where feasible.

“I'm increasingly seeing operators using the time between a payment payout request and when they've processed it as a KPI and seeing that as a competitive advantage tied to transaction success rate.” 

There is, however, a very real challenge to continually chasing quicker clicks and the processing of payments. And that lies in fraud. Lang underlines how chasing speed as a KPI opens operators up to fraud and risk. And Voitenko agrees. He says there are two types of fraud that arise when operators are too focused on increasing the speed of payouts. 

“There are those that we can fight effectively and those that we unfortunately need to just track and still find out how to file,” he explains. “The first type of fraud is bonus abuse and chargeback fraud. This can be easy to fight as we have a lot of data from our players. Analysis starts from devices, payment accounts, payment processing patterns, contacts, and even if they use certain automatic tools. It can be effectively fought. 

“But such new types of fraud, like account recoveries, are more challenging, especially here in the European Economic Area. In the UK, when PSD2 (the payment services directive 2) was launched it had such a strong player identification directive it helped a lot of secure card holders, but it shifted fraud to a new level and we see a lot of early account recoveries and we are still on our way to find out how to work with it because every time it requires our manual review and investigation.”

So how can payments to players actually be sped up successfully? Voitenko continues: “We want to automate all the payouts for our players and rely on the payment accounts they used before, or widely use on our platform across different merchants. But some players make payments from one account and want to withdraw it to another account, so what we are currently building is a self-verification flow where the players can verify in two steps the payment accounts they want. Then we can rely on that information, usually with one-time password flow, and speed up withdrawals without manual checks.

Tackling The Cross-Border Conundrum

Aside from payment speed, one of the biggest recurring pain points around banking and the gambling industry is cross-border payments, including pay-ins and pay-outs. As Voitenko explains, the challenges include currency conversion complexities, fluctuating exchange rates, and prohibitive additional bank fees, particularly in regions with limited access to global currencies like the US dollar or Euro. He says: “It's the main challenge, not only for us, but for all e-commerce when we're talking about cross-border payments.”

A potential solution to this is the use of stablecoins—cryptocurrencies designed to maintain stability relative to a reference asset, usually a fiat currency such as the US dollar. Stablecoins can offer lower fees and faster digital payment processing by avoiding traditional banks. Voitenko says: “With players like Revolut leading the way and major banks like HSBC adopting stablecoins too, this could be a practical step forward for iGaming. Payment giants like Stripe are explicitly focusing on stablecoins for 2025.”

GR8 Tech is all-in on stablecoins, as Voitenko puts it: “We heavily rely on stablecoins and their advantages. They're globally accessible, so we can offer nearly instant payments 24/7. We see how the world is changing with some big players announcing their own stablecoins. Recently, JP Morgan announced the launch of theirs. Being in iGaming, we want to be at the forefront of this innovation and adopt all possibilities that it can bring.”

Stablecoins are just one aspect of the wider payment landscape, which is constantly evolving as we move into the second half of the 2020s. As Pragmatic Solutions CEO Lang explains: “With the introduction of cryptocurrencies, there are more options available to players today than ever. But if you look at operators who are operating with fiat currency across what were traditionally yet-to-be-regulated or grey markets, I think payment processing has become more difficult.

“That’s because a lot of payment providers are now seeing a maturity of regulated markets, and that's where their attention is going. They're leaning towards the provision of service to locally regulated operators and shying away from service to remotely regulated operators. 

“So in the traditional payments world, it's very much moved in favor of operators with local licenses to have the most payment options or the largest, most common payment options available. Where markets are regulated, more payment providers are prepared to service the industry. 

As Lang touches upon, the options vary significantly between certain regions, with regulated markets and grey markets having clear differences between payment options. When it comes to navigating countries that offer fewer payment methods, GR8 Tech’s payments expert Voitenko explains: “As an iGaming platform provider, we offer two choices to our operators who want to enter new markets with limited banking options. The first is cryptocurrencies, and the second is account-to-account transfers

“When launching in Southeast Asia, we find a lot of payment providers are easily integrated with flows like account-to-account, but it's a huge opportunity for some markets like LatAm or the MENA region.

“After the initial launch, we can do further market research to find local payment methods for our operators in case they want to stay in these markets.“

A Changing Of The Guard

Alternative payment methods are the norm in newer iGaming markets. Voitenko says: “Traditional card payment methods and bank payment methods are commonly used in the western world, but if we go into Asian and African markets, we see that each market has its own alternative payment methods and localized iGaming payment solutions, and card adoption is not so high—I want to highlight that. Account-to-account flow and even QR payments are everywhere. Not all players or users have cards or even cryptocurrencies, but all of them have a bank account, and any kind of eWallet can be used to make a payment.”

But while cryptocurrencies can offer a payment solution for iGaming operators in emerging markets, bonus abuse expert Ozric Vondervelden, co-founder of Greco, issues a word of warning as to how the anonymity of crypto can be a challenge for businesses. He explains: “It's super easy for an individual to break the public blockchain history by passing that money through an exchange. There are also mixers and other ways players can do this—so you can't identify if two accounts have money sourced from the same place.”

Understanding The New Virtual Reality

Another significant issue for the industry right now is the use of virtual cards. Vondervelden elaborates: “It's probably not well understood, but when you go through the deposit screen—not just with the iGaming industry, but any sort of merchant—when you put the name of the cardholder, this isn't cross-referenced against the bank. So if you can create 1,000 virtual cards, you can assign each of those to a unique identity when multi-accounting, and this becomes a problem.”

There are potential problems with some alternative payment methods too—namely, eWallets. Vondervelden says: “They natively support multiple wallets to a single ID, which can be used across multiple accounts in the same casino.”

In fact, despite the surplus of payment options to operators across the industry now, payment issues remain rampant, with failed transactions frustratingly common for casinos, bookmakers, and players alike. When asked to dig into the reasons behind these issues, Voitenko says: “The main reasons are user-driven errors such as wrong payment details, card details, or insufficient funds. It’s common, and with this type of error, we cannot directly improve on that. All we can do is communicate with the players and ask them to be more precise, more careful, or use another payment account.

“This is a weak point, and it’s the reason we are trying to create a redirect to host integrations, even for alternative payment methods. We focus on these technical issues because we can investigate what goes wrong and find solutions.”

Even with many transaction errors being a fault on the side of the player, it remains clear that these payment delays can have a significant impact on user trust.

Communication Matters

So how can casinos and bookmakers keep users on side? Voitenko believes communication is key. “You must be transparent with players, so we communicate with them before they are going to make transactions or request withdrawals,” he says. “We specify the approximate payout time for each payment method at the withdrawal page, so a player can decide which to choose, and usually, after a few withdrawals, players decide they can rely on us.

“It's all about the player experience. If we inform them, ‘if you choose this payment method, it could take half a day,’ unfortunately, sometimes it happens. But because a player sees this and the money is credited to their account at this time, it helps us to build trust. We’re also transparent with the payment process, and we inform players what is happening live. So if you request a withdrawal, we will show that we are processing on our side and making checks, such as anti-fraud, or if it's already passed it to the payment provider and they are processing the withdrawal.

“On the other hand, we also adopt the best practice from the market, such as the 2020 or 2021 US-based case when FanDuel partnered with Visa and used Visa Direct to make withdrawals in a few minutes. It's only about card payments and card payouts, but we use such cases and reference them when talking to payment providers or card networks with a view to experimenting and launching similar experiences and to see if we can deliver the best experience for our players.”

Users aside, it's not always plain sailing for operators themselves to get suitable bank accounts in the first place, in certain markets. According to Jeffrey Haas, industry veteran and MD of ID8 Global Gaming Business Accelerator, even mature incumbents in the iGaming space can face difficulties obtaining and maintaining bank accounts. He explains: “If you are a regulated operator, the regulator should be ensuring your ability to get a bank account. You pass suitability, you've passed probity, you've gone through full visibility of every aspect of your financial health, and you've been able to secure money for deposits. The regulator should step up and ensure access to banking for operators because, without them taking some steps, it makes it very difficult for operators to operate compliantly in many of these jurisdictions, and payment friction occurs for many of the same reasons.

For Voitenko, though, the biggest fix to this corner of the iGaming landscape would be direct bank account payments across borders. He explains: “We talk a lot about cryptocurrencies and stablecoins in iGaming, and all that is changing right now. But the next thing for me is about account payments. Why so? Not every player has a bank-issued card, and not everyone is familiar with cryptocurrency. But everyone has a bank account and may deal with that bank account via eWallets. So if it becomes possible to make account-to-account payments across international borders, it will be beneficial not just for the iGaming industry but for commerce in general. If you could make these payments from bank accounts in Indonesia to the UK without intermediaries, it will unlock so many opportunities for growth in all e-commerce, and for iGaming in particular.”

A GR8 Case Study: How Proactive Partners Can Ease Payment Processing

Ivan Voitenko reveals how fruitful partnerships helped reduce issues around payment processing in Southeast Asia.

Recently, we were entering new markets in Southeast and Northeast Asia . We found a partner called 0xProcessing, and they were so proactive because we were entering a lot of markets – six-plus countries in one period. It was promising for everyone to enter new markets almost simultaneously. With further traffic growth, we diversified the risks by connecting additional crypto providers.

They helped us to enter this market so fast, although we integrated with them via white-label payment gateway Asquad, rather than directly. With Asquad, we were able to implement what we really wanted: a native flow in which users are not redirected to different providers, but remain within the product. This applies not only to crypto payments, but also to other bank transfers, QR payments, and more, which we are integrating after launching the brand in the region. All flows have a single design, improving the overall payment experience. 

Typically, we interact with payment providers through API-based payment gateway integration, which we implement and test. This is a flow that we use with major payment providers, but we also have our own API for integrating with small local payment providers. 

In some countries, we have famous brands operating on our platform, so some local payment providers want to work with these brands. In these Asian markets, it was a situation where the right partner helped us more than you could expect. Often, you're relying on yourself or your team to integrate payment methods—or even on the operators, because sometimes they provide their own payment providers. But in this case, with 0xProcessing, we entered several Asian markets. In less than three months, we entered more than six countries with a payment provider that, while integrating with us, was also integrating with local payment providers. Following these market entries, we launched a seamless host-to-host (H2H) QR payment flow following the rise of QR payments in Southeast Asia. This solution ensures fast, secure transactions, supports cross-border payments, and aligns with the region’s mobile-first trend. It was a huge win.