GPWA Times Magazine - Issue30 - October 2014

Optimal: Poker for NETeller is an im- portant part of our business, especially in Europe. Now that Nevada has opened up online and New Jersey as well, sponsor- ing the World Series is a very good oppor- tunity for us to get the brand out there. Even though it's a U.S. tournament, a lot of the value is not just in the U.S. but ev- eryone around the world is watching. The NETeller on the felt, that will be live on ESPN. (It) gets you a lot of exposure. We've also sponsored the online part (of the WSOP) so people that are check- ing the daily statistics and following things online in real time are seeing the NETeller branding as well. People around the world are seeing that and it adds a lot of value. Caesars, who owns the World Series of Poker, has been a very good partner of ours, so our way to give back to them and support them in the tournament was the sponsorship. The whole thing made sense to us. Skrill: We're very excited about being on TV in the U.S. and sponsoring the WPT. We've looked at lots of sponsorship op- portunities that are tangential. Is this hockey customer really going to become an online gambling customer? WPT cus- tomers are our target audience. So we're actually really excited about what we have for season 12 and season 13. We have a two-year deal coming up and it should be pretty fantastic. VN: In addition to providing alternatives at sticky points in the funnel, what can be done to educate consumers about alterna- tives to credit cards? Optimal: It's initiatives like ours to spon- sor the World Series of Poker. And we start branding NETeller as a viable tool in the online payment world for online gam- ing. There are multiple other sponsorship opportunities that we'll embark upon. We sponsored the Crystal Park football team to get our names on the shirt to build the awareness of NETeller. That's more Eu- ropean and Asian based. We're talking to professional sports franchises in New Jersey about doings things with them and building the brand. I think it's the combi- nation of a lot of things. It's our own mar- keting to get NETeller out. NETeller has a history and a past and a trusted repu- tation as being a very viable and trusted place to move money into online gaming institutions. I think we need to leverage that and make sure the community is re- acquainted with NETeller and that's what we're doing. VN: Payment processing is such an im- portant part of the ecosystem. You're obviously two different companies. You have the payment processor and the op- erator. What's the working relationship like? Is it tight, is it close? Or is there some distance? Optimal: We throw around the term "partner" a lot. These are our partners. All the operators, whether it's in New Jersey or Nevada or Delaware or anywhere else around the world where we're working, we have a very close relationship with them. Whether it's having dedicated ac- count managers so there's people on our side speaking to the operator daily, fig- uring out any issues, how can we make things better, what promotions can we run on NETeller, what can we do that we're not doing today, our goals for the operator are always aligned. We want to help them get as many approved compli- ant transactions through the door as pos- sible. Whatever we can do to help them we're going to do, and that involves a very close relationship. We have pretty routine meetings with our partners, with some of the operators, and we talk about specific promotions. I think we did some bonus top-up promotions with the Borgata and Caesars in New Jer- sey and we'll pursue others. We have an interest in partially financing some pro- motions that benefit the sites and benefit NETeller, as an example. So it's kind of a symbiotic relationship. Our success is the site's success and vice-versa. We roll up our sleeves and we get very, very in- volved on a very detailed basis and very intimate basis with the owner/operators of every site and every company that we deal with. VN: In terms of payment processing, are you seeing credit card payments into their Skrill wallet being blocked as well? Skrill: With Skrill, we ask you, because we have to, what you want to upload money for? So if you come to the Skrill website, it asks you if you're going to gamble or not. If you say yes, we then use the gam- bling code –- the correct one, whether it's Visa or MasterCard — and if it's a blan- ket block at that bank, they'll turn around and say sorry. That's when we (Skrill) will come back and say actually you can't use that card. It has nothing to do with us. Why don't you try one of these options, a PaySafe card, cash through digital ACH transfers, which you can do in a day, di- rect bank transfers, etc. We also have the first digital wallet that was licensed by MasterCard to accept gambling loads and code that transaction properly. VN: Europe is going in an interesting direction. Their regulatory scheme is becoming more like the U.S., in terms of fragmentation. What are the hurdles you're facing from a compliance stand- point in working with the different regu- latory schemes? Skrill: I think the changes that are being made on a state-by-state basis or a coun- try-by-country basis in Europe are mainly to do with taxation for the operators and are not necessarily things that impact our business. So we don't really mind when the operator is going to be taxed say 20 percent. Are we going to have a lot of Dutch operators start complaining for cheap fees? Maybe. We'll deal with that. It just comes down to compliance — what is legal and what is not legal. So in New Jersey you have to be within state borders. Is that an operator control or a payment processor control? It's working out these things. In gambling in Europe, we see that when we reach a certain critical mass of customers, we can offer more services. There's more demand. So with tens of millions of gamblers, maybe they want to see live video. Maybe they want to see live scores. Maybe they want to have one Skrill page where they can access every single PAYMENT PROCESSING IN IGAMING Reach out to players in the funnel at the right place and time