As competition increases and product offerings inevitably converge, the key differentiator for betting companies is customer experience. The way an operator handles its payments infrastructure is perhaps the most powerful lever they have to pull in this arena.
For bookmakers looking to develop an edge over their competitors, it's hard to innovate on the core product.
Take a tournament that captures everyone's attention, like the World Cup. Making sure you have the odds and betting options in place to maximize revenue is one thing, but your competitors will likely be offering much the same thing.
With several similar platforms to choose from, what will keep customers coming back and win new sign-ups is if the deposit and withdrawal processes are smooth and easy to manage.
Gone are the days of long-delayed withdrawals in an attempt to get customers to change their mind and wager more. Aside from the safer gambling implications of this kind of policy, consumers simply have better options for where to spend their money in the modern gambling ecosystem.
In an effort to maximise this advantage, gambling operators are increasingly bringing their payments operation in-house.
For decades, payments has been a service that has almost always been outsourced. After all, it is a sector that spans every industry, with a number of highly specialist vendors around the world.
However, the vital importance of winning in payments is driving some forward-thinking operators to trade the expertise of a supplier for the focus that comes with having their own team in-house.
What these companies have discovered is that faster and omnichannel payments are only as good as the teams running them. Bringing that talent within your organisation gives you the oversight to avoid potential pitfalls and the control to optimise for your own customers.
With in-house payments a growing trend in betting and iGaming, we are seeing major cross-pollination in talent from fintech to gaming.
Where once budgets would have been spent on procurement and outsourcing, they are instead being spent on recruitment and salaries.
This undoubtedly raises your risk profile a little in the short term. Building a new team is always going to come with challenges that wouldn't be faced if you relied on a well-known supplier.
That's why gaming companies are looking to fintech to staff these new ventures, because those people come with the experience to understand how to build payment flows from the ground up.
You already have the sports betting expertise in-house to train anyone unfamiliar with the intricacies of the industry. What you likely don't have is a deep well of payments industry knowledge.
This is leading gambling companies to seek out workforce talent partners with a detailed understanding of the payments sector, who can support them in finding the best staff to bring into their new in-house teams.
Here at PaymentGenes, we've seen increased demand among gambling companies for these key roles:
This perhaps goes without saying, but having your own Head of Payments is a new venture for many online gambling companies, which have typically allowed a CFO or someone under them to manage relationships with key outsourced vendors. Now that these capabilities are increasingly coming in-house, operators need their own payments experts on hand to run their teams.
Managing the design and delivery of new payments projects is absolutely critical for operators that want to keep themselves on the cutting edge of user experience.
As much as you in-house your payments function, the reality of e-commerce is that you will need to deal with a number of payment service provider partners, card schemes, and other stakeholders in order to keep your operation functioning smoothly.
The real engine of your deposit and withdrawal operation. We are seeing high demand for talented payment operations professionals.
The desire among gambling businesses to hire payments talent is being driven by a few key industry trends.
Account-to-account transfers are becoming a common way of depositing for many consumers. The method bypasses traditional payment rails and allows for near-instant deposits.
That's great for gambling businesses, but it raises expectations that money flowing in the other direction, via withdrawals, should travel just as instantaneously.
Thankfully, there are already solutions that deliver real-time payment rails. Think SEPA Instant in Europe, PIX in Brazil, and UPI in India. These are enabling withdrawals in minutes rather than days.
This is all part of the move towards embedded finance, where transactions and identity checks can all take place as part of the same UX journey.
The role of digital wallets is also evolving rapidly. They are increasingly tied to loyalty and bonus engines, with rewards such as automatic bonuses being triggered when funds are held in a branded wallet.
Payments in gambling is a much more complex world than it once was. With so many different methods and international variants to manage, coupled with heightened consumer expectations, it's easy to see why the recruitment market for payments professionals within gambling is skyrocketing.
In the world of Payments & FinTech, expansion isn’t just an opportunity - it’s a necessity. Whether you’re entering a newly regulated market, expanding your product offerings, or setting up operations in a high-growth region, success depends on one critical factor: having the right people in place at the right time.
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