GPWA Times Magazine - Issue30 - October 2014

Adding sophistication to payment processing ayment processing is one of the least talked about aspects of the online gaming ecosys- tem. It’s a classic no news is good news situation. No news means ev- erything is working the way it should. News means something is broken. Ideally, pay- ment processing should be as reliable as the sun rising in the east, Big Ben always being right and Gordon Ramsay swearing at incompetence. In Europe, payment processing for online gaming is fairly stable and well accepted. In the United States, the exact opposite is true. Between 50-to-60 percent of Visa transac- tions are being rejected. MasterCard has a significantly higher success rate. But many of its online gaming transactions are rou- tinely rejected as well. And with most Ameri- cans accustomed to using credit cards for e-commerce, online gaming payment proces- sors — and operators — have the enormous task of educating credit card issuers about gaming transactions and gaming consumers about payment alternatives. In July, top executives from the two largest digital wallets in the gaming industry — Op- timal Payments (NETeller) and Skrill — sat down with GPWA Editor-in-chief Vin Naray- anan at GiGSE in San Francisco to discuss the payment processing environment in the U.S., their plans for both the European and U.S. markets and their work with affili- ates. He also spoke with InComm, one of the world’s top providers for pre-paid cash cards and solutions. In his wide-ranging talks with Optimal, Skrill and InComm, the payment processing exec- utives lifted the veil on the intricacies and complexities of payment processing and de- scribed their visions for the future. The interviews with the three companies were conducted separately. Optimal Pay- ments was represented by President and CEO Joel Leonoff, Executive Vice President for Business Development Neil Erlick and Execu- tive Vice President Lorenzo Pellegrino. Skrill was represented by CEO Neil Steinhardt and VP of Leisure and Entertainment Joseph Hall. And InComm’s Tony Fontaine (vice president of business development), Bill Kuykendall (financial services business development) and Karina Grotz explained their pre-paid card solution and strategy to Narayanan. For the sake of space and clarity, the Optimal Payments and Skrill interviews are present- ed as one conversation, and speakers have been identified by company only to make the conversation easier to follow. Due to space constraints, less than one-third of the interviews have been published. 31 Adding sophistication to payment processing