When Yaamava’ Casino Resort in Highlands California reopened three years ago after being closed due to the pandemic, patrons lined up to get in. Temperature checks and other precautions caused lines to form.
Taking a page from Disney resorts, Yaamava’ General Manager Peter Arceo had ATMs installed near the lines that dispensed TITO tickets to reduce the handling of cash.
“What we learned was that people loved it so much, when we reopened without all the restrictions, they continued to go to those machines,” Arceo said Tuesday during the panel discussion, “Are the Tribes Behind the Curve with Digital Payments,” at the Indian Gaming Association Tradeshow and Convention in San Diego.
Arceo’s example provided a tangible answer to the premise of the discussion, hosted by NRT Sales Director Tamara Hansen. While cashless payments at tribal properties aren’t prevalent, they’re not behind the curve compared to gaming industry writ large.
“I think that tribes are equal to commercial gaming,” Arceo said. “You’ll find that some tribal casinos haven’t rolled out a digital payments solution, as much as as on the commercial side. I really think that they’re balanced and equal in that regard.”
“Of our land-based cashless deliveries today, our tribal versus commercial casinos, I would say that it’s equal,” said IGT Senior Director, Payments, Lisa Schiffer.
Where tribal properties do fall behind is true of the gaming industry as a whole. According to Sightline Payments SVP, Strategic Development and Government Affairs Jonathan Michaels, the payment experiences in retail and at restaurants that patrons are afforded aren’t keeping up on gaming floors.
But in the aftermath of the pandemic and the concerns about how – or if – the gaming industry would recover, the push to adopt cashless systems wasn’t ponderous.
“The good news is that people haven’t said you need to have cashless solutions or some customers wouldn’t back,” Michaels said. “It also gives the industry the opportunity to deliberate about how they approach this. But you need to be thinking about this, because customers are expecting it and how you roll it out, the right away, is really important. It’s not that the tribes are behind, it’s more how do we make sure that over the next three to five years, this payment experience across the gaming industry reflects more what we in our daily lives.”
It is, however, incumbent on the gaming industry to mirror cashless-payment systems available across American commerce. Schiffer stated that cash payments have declined by 30 percent since 2020 and in the next five years will account for less than 10 percent of retail.
Schiffer thinks that it’s thus important to make sure that the industry becomes “comfortable” with cashless payments, because “that’s where it’s going to be and it will drive more yield. So we’ll make the money back in the long run and that’s what players expect.”
One of the issues that operators must address is the highly regulated nature of gaming and the banking industries. Thorsten Toms, a clients-solutions executive for Gaming Labs International and a former regulator with the Michigan Tribal Gaming Commission, said it’s important to be proactive and conduct talks with regulatory bodies before deploying cashless systems.
“Whatever cashless solution you want to implement, let’s make sure that there’s nothing preventing that in regulation,” Toms said. “And if it’s something that’s important, it can take a long time. Are there any roadblocks to prevent you from implementing that solution, that operation, you would like to put in place? And if there are, what can you do overcome those roadblocks?”
Arceo said it’s important for tribal entities to remember that, as with all new technologies, the transition to cashless-payment systems will see some things that work and others that don’t.
“But once things taper off and plateau,” Arceo said, “everyone figures out how to operate in this new world where we’ve kind of gone through the pain of all the developments and what ifs, and now we know this is where our customers want to be, this is where the industry is going to land. I think as an industry, we’re still on that incline up. There’s still a lot of pain in development, but don’t let that discourage you. It’s actually the exciting part of that arc, in my opinion, because we get to create new things and come up with new ideas and collaborate with our customers, our regulators, and our compliance folks. This is where we get to set the future of the industry, so let’s participate. Why not?”
