Paying your way

When it comes to the payments world, it’s becoming clear that egaming customers are after three main things: speed, convenience and, where possible, to share as little private information about themselves as possible.

Step forward Bitcoin, mobile carrier billing and e-wallets: three methods which have the potential to revolutionise the industry as they influence customer expectations.

More and more these days, customers are unwilling to trust and share their personal information with websites, making it increasingly difficult for merchants to offer attractive payments methods.

The anonymity of Bitcoin adds a layer of trust to untrusted environments, encouraging website visitors to make the extra step to conversion.

It’s also cost-effective and immediate: no undisclosed fees, no lagtime over approved transactions.

At the same time it’s volatile and unregulated, giving rise to a great deal of uncertainty. As a result, the product is appealing only to a very small segment.

For the industry to scale up and become a real competitor to the traditional payments, there needs to be some kind of market-wide reassurance for customers; reassurance that an amount that is significant today does not become worthless tomorrow when converted to Bitcoin.

That is difficult to deliver with the cryptocurrency in its current infancy. Mobile payments are driving consumer usage.

In-game payments allow transactions to be carried out on the mobile devices without user redirection and the ‘oneclick’ payment solves one of the most annoying reasons for mobile purchase abandonment: a lengthy payment process.

With smartphones providing entertainment anytime, anywhere, the use of mobile payments to monetise gaming content is a core focus for many egaming merchants.

Mobile payments are a core focus for the industry

Mobile payments operators are well aware of this and are working hard to address transaction flow across different devices.

Our advice to merchants is that when choosing a payment provider, they should always look at the mobile compatibility of the solutions they are offered.

Emerging markets from the Western perspective are usually associated with less advanced card operations. However, in such markets, what the Western civilisation deems as alternative payments, like e-wallets, are in fact traditional payment types.

Card brands such as Visa or MasterCard are the ones viewed as alternative payments. It’s imperative for gaming operators to recognise that different markets operate in different ways, and adjust accordingly.

Educating local markets and converting them to what we believe to be traditional is a lengthy, costly and unnecessary process.

That energy is better spent changing systems and processes within their own companies to accommodate these markets.

For gaming merchants, e-wallets and alternative payment methods carry significant revenue potential. They are a way of gaining sales that would otherwise have been lost, both in emerging and established markets.

Banks offering card payments will have already defined their risk appetite, therefore many transactions are declined by issuer/acquirer systems.

Alternative payment methods offer the possibility of servicing customers through other products that are not as restrictive as traditional card schemes.

The dynamics of these markets are interesting to watch – particularly as we start to see a trend of people trusting alternative payment methods more than they trust banks and institutions. Whether or not Bitcoin will manage to surpass the banks remains the big unknown.

A takeaway for merchants adapting to payments developments should be, as always, flexibility. They need to be flexible and adaptable to trends early on and make sure that their payment providers are equally on top of these developments.