Everi continues to showcase its ever-expanding Digital Neighborhood as it reported an all-time quarterly record of revenues in August.
The provider of land-based and digital casino gaming content and products has a Digital Neighborhood that represents a complete suite of financial, casino loyalty and compliance products and services. Cashless gaming is a big part of that.
“All of that is progressing according to our product road map and, as it relates to wallets, we’re expecting through the end of the year to probably more than double the number of locations and jurisdictions where our wallet will be going live,” said Darren Simmons, executive vice president and FinTech business leader at Everi.
Everi’s digital CashClub Wallet technology is powering Penn National Gaming’s mychoice Wallet at several properties and more are on the way. There are installations with other customers that will go live in the second half of 2022.
“I’m excited about the continued progress,” said Simmons. “It’s going as expected and at the pace we expected. We knew this would be evolutionary in terms of implementation and maturity and growth of it. All good in terms of execution, delivery and customer acceptance. It’s very revolutionary from a technology standpoint in the amazing product innovations we brought along.”
The goal is to have consistent and constant improvement in technology and measuring (key performance indicators) and behaviors, especially as the database grows of players who have wallets and enjoy their gaming experience using it, Simmons said.
“We are continuing to evolve and get more mature data about that behavior, and it’s becoming very valuable,” he explained. “It’s all very consistent with our initial thesis with the wallet when we began this journey several years ago.”
No single supplier in the gaming industry processes more financial access transactions than Everi, with more than $37 billion from more than 125 million transactions in 2021.
The CashClub Wallet digital technology is currently deployed across six jurisdictions at 19 casinos, with 20 additional casino properties under various stages of deployment.
“Our journey for this is we have this amazing delivery channel for how people are accessing funds and entertainment dollars in brick-and-mortar casinos,” Simmons said. “As we think about this transition to digital payments in general and the integration and opportunity to extend in the online space for sports and igaming, we developed a robust rules-based engine that gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility in terms of functionality and value-add in this platform that in my view makes us leaders.”
Everi didn’t take an e-commerce model, unlike competitors, Simmons noted. Its approach is to have it part of the ecosystem of products and services that Everi provides today and give the operator value with player engagement and efficiency. That’s where the company continues to differentiate, he said.
“We built an omnichannel solution and were the only ones able to bring that to market and successfully deploy it,” Simmons said. “Not only does it connect to the gaming floor, but we’ve extended it to the non-gaming floor. That is very powerful in itself, but more importantly for the connections into the loyalty aspects and the [anti-money laundering] aspects of it. That’s critical to an operator by not having to reinvent the wheel and bring something that isn’t connected to the core mission-critical solution that already exists on their floor today. It’s one thing to have the soundbite that you can add a wallet, but if it’s not embedded with other things, you haven’t brought a tremendous amount of value to your organization.”
Everi, which won the Payment Solution of the Year Award for its digital wallet at the 2022 SBC Awards North America, continues to build value and invest in the digital ecosystem.
Everi has added payment alternatives that will be further highlighted at the Global Gaming Expo in October in Las Vegas. There will be some crypto opportunities, and Simmons expects to have pilot locations announced during the third quarter.
“The whole idea is we want to give people choice and convenience around how they want to have funding options,” he shared. “Today is debit card, credit card, ACH, cryptocurrency. We have alternative payment types that we completed, development work, and the integration that will go live for pilot locations in the third quarter. We offer more transaction types for the players and operators to provide as options.”
Everi continues to build out the mobile platform it provides for customers and has integration of the loyalty program platform called Trilogy. The wallet is built into that as well.
“End-to-end we are able to provide a full mobile app with loyalty and promotional capabilities and digital wallet capabilities with multiple payment options for our customers that are targeted towards brick-and-mortar and obviously sports and online,” Simmons said. “It’s exciting to have this comprehensive offering, and we’re looking forward to the continued growth of this with the additional value-added functionality and features.”
Responsible gaming continues to be a focus, and Everi is working on leveraging the April acquisition of XUVI, a marketing platform provider designed to value, target and engage customers to increase loyalty through immersive data analytics, utilizing customer behaviors and artificial intelligence.
“It’s going to be a great opportunity for us in terms of bringing campaign management and machine learning and AI technology that will be able to leverage for ways to help jurisdictions, gaming operators and gaming initiatives to have better tools to help provide responsible content and notifications to players and for the operators. We are leaders in trying to provide valuable tools for responsible gaming as we move more towards digital. It will provide valuable responsible gaming notifications to players and operators.”
