Secure payments for safer gaming

Safety is at the core of the gaming industry. Providers and governments around the world are increasingly introducing, enforcing and applying new regulations to help keep players from harm.

In the U.K., the Gambling Commission has the role of setting these rules, including those that ensure the gaming industry promotes safer gaming. For businesses not following the rules, the Gambling Commission will investigate and take the appropriate action.

With expanding compliance rules to meet, providers may need to adapt their processes to stay in operation and maintain consumer trust.

Payments have long been considered a crucial element of the gaming experience and may offer a way to build trust and confidence with players, while also helping to meet growing expectations around secure experiences.

What’s currently on the table?

Gaming is a fast-growing industry – expected to grow 59.7% from 2021 to 2022. Part of this growth can be attributed to increased regulation. Established gaming nations are embracing stronger regulations, and many closed markets are starting to introduce legalized gaming.

The province of Ontario in Canada, which up to April 2022 was a prime market for offshore providers, has now launched regulated gaming to provide better control over players that were previously accessing sites outside of Canada.

Looking across the pond, the U.K.’s Gambling Commission set in place new regulations in 2021, which banned features such as slot spin speeds faster than 2.5 seconds and auto-play for online slot games, as well as reverse withdrawals for all online gaming in an effort to make gaming safer. Restrictions have also impacted other areas of payment. From April 2020, players could no longer use credit cards to pay for bets.

These enhanced regulations aren’t limited to the U.K. In fact, from Worldpay's Global Gaming Payments report, we found that 14 of the 19 nations we covered have recently made or are considering updates to their gaming laws. In Belgium, for example, weekly deposits are capped at €500 across all licensed online gaming sites.

A similar regulation has been rolled out in Sweden – and it’s already showing positive results for safer gaming. With a new deposit limit of SEK 1,000 per month for 18-to-19-year-olds, unhealthy gaming has dropped to just 3% among this age group since coming into play in January 2022.

Such changes have attracted plaudits from industry associations, and the Betting and Gaming Council has praised the U.K. gaming industry’s approach to Corporate Social Responsibility for its contribution to responsible gambling.

Prepare for winning ways

What’s on the horizon in gaming? The U.K.’s £13bn-a-year gambling sector, which includes the largest regulated online market in the world, is seeing new regulations come into play.

The U.K.’s Gambling Commission updated its list of rules on high-risk players. From September 2022, it will require operators to identify ‘at risk’ customers and exempt the person from all marketing and bonus offerings. This will mean having to tighten controls and expand your view of customer behavior to be more aware of risky interactions – across all touchpoints.

You may want to explore tokenization. Worldpay OmniToken can help ensure the right technologies are utilized and implemented in alignment with security standards while also offering a payment and channel agnostic solution to give you one focused view of a customer.

While it may feel like providers are facing greater boundaries and regulations, it’s important to consider that your customers will have concerns around security, too. In Argentina and Mexico, for example, payment details being stolen is the biggest concern for bettors, and more than half of all players in both countries list this as a worry.

Players place significant importance on trust – and meeting safety restrictions may mean better player retention. Reputation is a major deciding factor for customers, with 19% choosing ‘best reputation’ as the reason why they have an operator preference. This is even higher than ‘best odds’ at 11%.

Having the right tools in place can help you bring this needed confidence to customers and may also reduce risk around payments. Displaying third-party consumer protection indicators can increase the likelihood of a U.K. consumer using an operator by 49%, and showing digital authentication logos can increase this likelihood by 45%.

Now and going forward, maintaining that trust with customers is crucial for success in the industry.

Payments can play a part

Offering secure payments can help to strengthen your reputation and build loyalty, which can lead to customer retention and growth.

Authentication at the point of payment is one effective way to combat fraud. Players are willing to authenticate in at least two ways when making an online payment, over three-fourths (78%) confirmed to us in a recent study. Fingerprint is the preferred biometric authentication method, with 58% choosing this as their favorite, compared with 18% for face ID.

You may also want to consider the benefits of open banking, as it can provide greater confidence for consumers authorizing payments and can improve the payout experience.

With Worldpay, you have access to products such as FraudSight and our Disputes suite, which help tackle issues around approval rates, reduce fraudulent chargebacks and keep you in control of disputes.

Offering a multi-layered solution that combines data insights, technology and our expertise to predict if a transaction may be fraudulent, FraudSight adds extra provisions to help improve security for you and your customers. By using Dispute suite, we can help protect your revenue from the threat of invalid chargebacks.

Committing to safety

With regulators in the U..K and around the world driving stronger rules for compliance and consumers actively seeking out reassurance around security, it’s time to consider your capabilities for safety.

Our tools enable operators to make payments a differentiator, with secure payouts, options for improved customer experience and authorization solutions that help put you in control and reduce the need for manual checks.

To learn more about payments for the future of gaming, please get in touch with us at Worldpay.