Trustly, the global leader in Pay by Bank, is expanding into land-based casinos with a simple pledge: Get more money on the floor faster.
“Players at brick-and-mortar casinos have resisted switching to cashless because of the friction most digital wallets impose, said John Parsons, Chief Business Officer of Gaming at Trustly. “In contrast, Trustly enables slot players to simply scan a QR code on a machine, load funds instantly from their personal bank account to the machine, and start playing. And it all happens in 30 seconds or less. There’s no account, no signup, no app required.”
“The first value (of cashless) is ‘how do we get money onto the machine?’” Parsons said. “Trustly was purpose-built for payments from day one, so we knew that our solution could solve the cashless dilemma.”
Trustly was founded in 2008 and has processed over $500B in total payments value globally since inception, operates in more than 30 countries, and works with over 9,000 merchants. The Americas Division, Trustly, Inc., is based in San Carlos, Calif. The company processes more than 300 transactions per second and works with more than 12,000 banks, 8,000 of them in the United States covering 99 percent of American bank accounts. Trustly boasts 99.99 percent uptime and around-the-clock technical support through chat, phone, or email.
Parsons said operators should demand this level of proven scalability when considering a cashless provider. “When players are moving money on and off machines at peak times, operators need to be confident in their ability to meet those player demands.” he said. “That only happens with a Pay by Bank provider with 15 years of experience and hundreds of billions of payments value under its belt, like Trustly.”
Online gaming operators using Trustly include DraftKings, FanDuel, Bet MGM, Caesars Digital, and Hard Rock Digital.
Trustly also has partnered with several CMS providers to enable money transfers with bank-level security for land-based operations, with live integrations available today. The list includes IGT, Light & Wonder, and Konami. The goal for brick-and-mortar casinos is to leverage technology already on a slot machine instead of adding readers or other gizmos. Parsons said IGT is about to deploy machines whose service window features a constantly changing QR code to provide an ultra-secure connection between a customer’s phone and bank. Light & Wonder is beta-testing a similar technology. Acres and CasinoTrac also work with Trustly. Thus far, Station Casinos is the only land-based gaming operator employing the company, but Parsons said negotiations with others are underway.
With Trustly, “there are no app downloads, no account creation, and no additional passwords to remember,” Parsons explained. “Players use their phone to scan the QR code, securely sign into their online banking, and load money instantly on the machine. All of the security features that we have in place plus all the security features their bank has in place ensure that players are protected.”
He added that Trustly is already working with two CMS providers to allow similar transactions at table games.
Trustly bills itself as the world’s No. 1 provider of Pay by Bank transactions, which allow payments to be received in seconds without using debit or credit cards. With KYC data from the banks, Trustly can instantly verify a player’s identity and access account information that both minimizes the risk of fraud and aids operators’ own KYC and AML efforts. Trustly has consumer-permissioned access to a person’s bank deposit and withdrawal information. “We can see if there are non-sufficient funds issues and if there are any indicators of financial stress on the player,” Parsons said. Players can set a limit for how much they withdraw within a 24-hour period.
While cashless transactions have not gained much of a foothold so far in brick-and mortar casinos, Parsons said the switch “is almost inevitable.”
“The instinct of 10 years ago that things are going cashless was correct. Friction created the bottleneck to player adoption” he said. “We’ve cleared the path to a viable cashless solution with a superior payment experience via Pay by Bank, and it will positively affect in-person and online gaming moving forward.”
