Online payment service provider emerchantpay has released a new white paper investigating the topic of payments in the gambling sector.
The global research – dubbed The Performance Pulse white paper – found 50% of gambling operators are currently losing revenue due to a weakness with their payment gateway.
Jonas Reynisson, CEO, emerchantpay, said: “Too many gambling operators are simply ‘leaving money on the table’ by not offering their customers the fastest, easiest, most personalised payment experiences possible and by not fully understanding, detecting and preventing fraud.”
Additionally, 55% of payments professionals within the gambling sector outline that business leaders are demanding improvements to payments performance, being described as a “matter of urgency.”
emerchantpay also discovered 60% of payments leaders maintain that in the next 12 months “significant improvements” in its systems is a necessity otherwise firms will begin to feel the effect on its customer and revenue statistics.
Reynisson continued: “What’s more, they’re risking customer loyalty and brand reputation by neglecting performance.
“Operators have to start providing payments leaders with the tools, skills and support to do their jobs effectively and to deliver real value to the organisation.
“The opportunity for those businesses that can put in place the processes, technologies and behaviours necessary to optimise payments performance are huge.”
The white paper claims 39% of payments leaders feel its sector is value within the wider business and only 35% believe that business stakeholders “fully understand” the benefits of an agile payment infrastructure.
Furthermore research shows senior business leaders in the gambling sector are focusing on innovation and transformation within payments instead of its current systems and delivery.
Over three quarters (76%) of gambling payment leaders report that analysing payments data is a challenge within their organisation and the majority of operators are failing to review and optimise performance on a monthly basis in areas such as domestic routing, merchant identification number set-up and processing through the payment gateway.
Arguably the most worrying statistics from the report comes as only 42% of operators are reviewing and optimising their payment pages on a monthly basis; 22% of payment leaders in gambling are “fully satisfied” with their organisations current ability to monitor fraud in real-time – a lower proportion than in any other sector according to the paper.
Other barriers to improving performance in gambling are the burden of regulation and compliance obligations which are becoming an increasing drain on resources (40%), lack of in-house resources and skills (30%), finding appropriate partners / vendors (28%) and outdated technology and tools (24%).
Reynisson concluded: “Operators need to ensure they have access to the data they need across all areas of their payments infrastructure and the dedicated resources and skills to translate this data into meaningful and actionable insights.
“The payments industry has to do a better job in supporting payments teams in all areas of the gambling industry to develop robust business cases for investment in this area, which prove the commercial value of increased performance, in terms of enhanced customer experience, increased revenue and higher margins.”
