In this context, ensuring smooth online transactions should be a top priority – in the view of Filippos Antonopoulos, Founder and CEO of digital payments specialist OKTO, it is a top-three decision maker.
‘A top three decision making factor’
Ahead of the SBC Summit Lisbon, where OKTO will have an extensive presence including at the Payment Expert Summit, Antonopoulos reflects on the company’s experience of the modern payments ecosystem and the demands made of it, with a particular focus on the iGaming sector.
“Velocity and efficiency of payments, and especially withdrawals, ranks historically as a top three decision making factor for choosing a gaming operator,” he says. “Not only is a wide range of options necessary, but in 2025 such a range needs also to be of a very high quality and efficiency of service.”
Tech progress and innovation have made the range of payment methods available to businesses now as wide as it ever has been – this isn’t opinion, it’s a simple fact. It is also a fact that betting and gaming businesses cannot afford to ignore.
Betting is a highly competitive industry, home to various companies of varying sizes, from small independent bookmakers to huge conglomerates encompassing multiple brands and active across multiple continents.
To differentiate from the competition, ensuring a varied choice of payment methods for customers is very valuable in building up customer loyalty. Ensuring that transactions are carried out seamlessly and efficiently, particularly with withdrawals, is the icing on this cake.
Gaming is not just a competitive business, however, but a multi-dynamic one. Many companies are active in two different realms – retail, mainly via high-street betting shops and casino venues, and online. The past decade or so has seen operators look to fill the gap between retail and online payments, achieving an efficient omnichannel experience.
“The practical answer is that they need a payment account, in the format of a digital wallet, in order to pivot across a multichannel offering,” Antonopoulos remarks. “That said, the challenge is in the various integrations between gaming systems, and specifically making sure that the integrations are subordinate to the user journey.”
Bridging the digital divide
Digitalisation is a process that has touched all walks of life, a process accelerated greatly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The impact this has had on payments is clear and widely discussed, and gaming too has felt these changes.
For an industry that for many years has been dominated by brick-and-mortar operations – the many high-street bookies active throughout the UK and the huge casinos of Las Vegas are perhaps the most obvious examples – it would be easy to think that digitisation has proven a challenge for traditional retail betting customers.
In Antonopoulos’ view, this is the opposite. If anything, he believes, it is customers who have embraced digitisation the most. Operators need to meet this need, and ensure their customers are not being left beyond.
“I think it is the traditional retail operators that are creating hurdles to their already digitised retail customers,” he says. “These hurdles have to do with the slow velocity in adopting and implementing widely digital payments in the land-based ecosystem.”
Hurdles can be found in the betting payments journey in numerous ways. It is up to both operators and payment technology providers to identify the most pressing matters and find ways to address them. Identifying potential advantages and enhancements to this journey is also critical.
KYC as part of the payments experience has a lot of influence on the payments experience, Filippos explains, citing its “positives on compliance, and its negatives on user experience.”
Similarly, recent years have seen various technologies, solutions and practices leave their mark on the payments landscape. Open Banking, Artificial Intelligence, embedded finance, crypto and blockchain are just a few of the more widely known examples.
Antonopoulos cites centralised account-to-account (A2A) banking systems as a development with ‘massively positive effects’. Striving to remain at the forefront of innovation, OKTO introduced both Open Banking and A2A payments into its offering.
He explains: “We are actively seeking and introducing Open Banking and A2A payment methods to both our gateway and our digital wallet across as many jurisdictions as possible. At the same time, we are investing in the emerging trend of payment orchestration.”
A vision for Brazil
Citing an eagerly anticipated gaming market as an example of the growing importance of A2A payments, he adds: “For example, you cannot tell the story about Brazilian igaming growth without also telling the story of PIx.”
The long wait for Brazil to regulate a nationwide betting market is nearly over. Market launch is expected by the end of the year, and the country’s newly created betting regulator has received countless applications from prospective licence holders.
The payment opportunity in Brazil is just as big as the gaming opportunity. OKTO has been actively building up its presence in the market, working to position itself as a leading payments provider to the country’s growing iGaming industry.
Companies have a lot of factors to consider, however. Above all else, Filippos hopes to see a “healthy balance between cost and excellence of operation, and a minimum viable proposition when it comes to local payments.”
He continues: “Also, making sure that there is a balance between payment technology and banking settlements, especially when the latter is dictated by local regulation and tax considerations.”
As Brazil’s betting market develops, the onus will be on all stakeholders to ensure social responsibility remains front and centre.
This is a task which will involve, of course, the bookmakers themselves, but also the firms which supply them with solutions, the country’s betting regulator, and the Central Bank of Brazil, operator of the widely used Pix network, which will be the main payment method used for gaming transactions by Brazilians.
Post-launch, OKTO’s Founder and CEO believes there will be a "big challenge by the regulator and the central bank to further unify the two sectors in driving responsibility, responsible growth, for the gaming industry.”
“It is now not just payments but also banking, and compliance,” he summarises.
OKTO’s global viewpoint
Although it is a market which has caught the attention of countless betting and payments stakeholders, and rightly so, Brazil is not the only country on OKTO’s agenda. The multinational company has been rolling out its solutions across the globe, from its founding market of Greece to emerging financial markets like India.
As the world’s fifth largest economy, India is home to growing banking and technology industries, but often does not receive the same attention as other prominent financial markets like the US, Western Europe, Japan and China, to name a few.
When asked about whether India’s fintech potential has been missed by some stakeholders, Antonopoulos responds: “We certainly see proportionally less international stakeholders in India than we would expect, and therefore I guess the answer is yes.
“That said, I think that India has also been overlooked by gaming stakeholders, with a caveat of the limited product range that are legal and regulated in this massive market. OKTO has placed a bet that the above divergence is going to close in the next two to three years.”
From its standing as a prominent international payments solutions provider, OKTO has been able to make some astute observations about conditions across minute markets. Noting major differences across continents and neighbouring countries, Antonopoulos concludes that ‘product market fit comes first, it also applies to payments’.
“What OKTO tries to do is get that right and scale it to production and make it part of our overall payment portfolio,” he emphasises his company’s approach.
As Antonopoulos’ conversation with Payment Expert comes to a close, the conversation turns to the upcoming Payment Expert Summit, part of the wider SBC Summit taking place in Lisbon later this month.
OKTO will have an extensive on-the-ground presence at the SBC Summit, showcasing its solutions to the sector whilst some of its key team members share views on payments developments in panel discussions.
“We see more and more payment exhibitors at the various SBC shows, and given the size of Lisbon, I expect we will see a record number,” he concludes.
“If anything, I think the challenge is going to be filtering between micro payment specialists, one-size-fits-all payments conglomerates and the golden section of large companies that have geographical focus.”
Source: GMB
