Q&A with Paysafe’s Rory Howard ahead of iGB Live! iGaming conference

In the countdown to the Amsterdam event, Paysafe’s GM of iGaming for EMEA shares his thoughts on European iGaming and the Latin American iGaming market’s evolution.

Next week, Paysafe will be exhibiting at iGB Live! (Booth 12-D30) Why is this an important show for the team?

With the ICE London conference in February marking the unofficial start of the global iGaming industry’s year, iGB Live! serves as a mid-year check-in for the team. It’s a great opportunity to catch up with longstanding and newer partners, with this year’s show being particularly important for Paysafe due to some major strategic partnerships we’ve recently finalized.

As a conference, iGB Live! is unsurprisingly strongly focused on the European market, though it also mirrors the increasingly globalized nature of the iGaming industry. In Amsterdam, we’ll be connecting with operators which we’re partnered with in not only Europe but also across North America and Latin America.

With that global context in mind, what would you say are the key iGaming industry trends, including around payments?

A crucial recent development has been the ongoing expansion of the regulated Latin American online gambling space, including markets like Peru, whose legislation was enacted in February, and Brazil, with South America’s most populated country expected to finalize its regulatory framework for fixed-odds betting by month-end. International operators and payment providers like Paysafe, with our payment solutions’ high popularity in LATAM and our local presence with our PagoEfectivo and SafetyPay business units, are following the market’s evolution closely.

In terms of global iGaming payments, the need for innovation is essential, especially when addressing core challenges such as fraud rates. And while technology like open banking has the potential to be a game-changer for the payment experience, there remain significant hurdles to negotiate before there is wider adoption. Above all, global operators face the challenge of tailoring their cashiers to the diverse payment preferences of players across different markets.

How do players’ payment preferences vary across global markets?

Every jurisdiction is unique. In the mature UK market, cards are king, with debit cards the go-to payment method of players (against the backdrop of the credit card restriction). While digital wallets enjoy niche popularity among UK bettors, usage trends even higher in continental Europe, with over half of Italian and German players regularly using a wallet like our Skrill and NETELLER solutions for wagering, according to our 2024 research.

Germany is also a market where cash usage is still robust in consumers’ everyday lives, and so demand for online cash products for iGaming like PaysafeCard remains strong. This trend is even more pronounced in Latin America, with its relatively large underbanked population.

And from country to country, there are local payment methods unique to the market like BLIK in Poland, Venmo in the US, and Pix in Brazil. There can be no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to global iGaming payments.     

Last month Paysafe won the ‘Payments Company’ EGR B2B Award. What makes Paysafe’s offering unique for European operators?

Our latest award recognizes several aspects of our iGaming offering. The breadth of Paysafe’s solution in terms of payment methods is relatively unparalleled. Through a single, streamlined integration, operators can connect their cashiers to our acquiring solution for card payment processing, our Skrill and NETELLER wallets, PaysafeCard and PaysafeCash online cash products plus a multitude of LPMs.

In addition, the quality of support our operator partners receive is exceptional. This reflects how we’ve strengthened both our relationship team and our new business team by recruiting professionals from a variety of payments and iGaming backgrounds – from card processing, alternative payments and KYC to risk. The last year has truly been transformational for not just our iGaming team but the whole of Paysafe.

What are the iGaming team’s plans for the rest of 2024 and beyond?

Transformation will continue to be our watchword, including further strengthening our product offering. In Europe, we’ll be placing an important emphasis on our acquiring business and card processing for operators that already use our wallets and online cash solutions.

At a market level, we’ll be closely monitoring other Latin American markets’ evolution, including Mexico and Argentina. And beyond the Americas and Europe, we’re also keeping a pulse on regulatory change in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Change is a constant in the global iGaming space – and at Paysafe we continue to transform our business to make change pay.