Pols
Un enfocament polivalent
By Lewis - 10 de gener de 2025
The world of payments and money movement has undergone a significant shift over the past few years. Victor Newsom, SVP Product Management, Payments Solutions for Everi discusses the latest advancements in the payments space, from cashless gaming and tokenisation to real-time payments networks and modern security innovations.
As you can expect, the retail and banking worlds continue to try to leverage technology to reduce risk and increase convenience. Often, these solutions either assume a bank-like “account to account” scenario, or a purchase transaction, such as a meal or goods (e.g. a TV). The casino use-case is more of a hybrid between a retail use-case and a banking-centric expectation.
Many of the underlying technologies people are hearing about are actually not that new. They are simply becoming more visible as we work with regulators and get operators comfortable with them, while we also work to disrupt attempts from bad actors. Real-time for convenience can mean real-time for abuse.
Just as banks found when Zelle displaced person-to-person check payments – it also allowed for fraudsters to target consumer segments with telephone fraud replacing mail/check fraud in real time. Fortunately, we have deep expertise and technology investments that help Everi and its customers address the risks while delivering the convenience promised by these solutions, as they range from: Real Time Payments to Crypto currencies, to FedNow, and Push-to-Card with our Wallet, Bitline, B4U, QuikTicket, QuikTransfer, CashClub Concierge, and other products.
Gaming regulators are grappling with the challenge of balancing innovation with consumer protection, financial stability and playing catch-up with evolving technologies. How is Everi navigating the regulatory labyrinth across gaming sectors and geographies?
This is certainly a perennial challenge, but it must be addressed. As the initial stimulus of change from COVID has dissipated, we have seen a return to the “status-quo” approach in many regions. I would be remiss, though, if I did not also credit many regulators who have come to us at trade shows to learn more about technology. Still, the pace of change has slowed a bit. The successful formula has been a partnership with the operators. Open and early engagement with the regulators and arm-in-arm with the operators has resulted in consistent progress in making the case for change.
I will also state that we face the same scrutiny from card schemes, financial institutions, and financial regulators when we are bringing their domain into gaming, so this collaborative approach is critical for success in both directions.
Additionally, Everi makes continued investments in licensing, technology, and – most importantly – people, in order to be able to develop, certify, and deploy solutions that deliver value in a compliant and high-performing manner.
By 2026, around 60 per cent of the world’s population is predicted to use digital wallets. What more can be done to break down the cross-border barriers that restrict digital wallets and strengthen the global wallet ecosystem?
Many challenges remain as we seek to reduce friction across all touchpoints. Know-Your-Customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML), sanctions, privacy, settlement timing and risk, source of funds, technology integrations, and many other considerations are in play. By developing our payments composability, payments orchestration, and transactional identity capabilities while working with compliant on/off ramps at increasingly distant edges of our ecosystem, we can continue expanding the global reach of these solutions. With Everi’s growing footprint of subsidiaries and legal entities across the globe, along with our banking partnerships, we will continue to expand the reach of our products and services!
How will Everi look to bolster its FinTech presence across global gaming markets in 2025?
Everi has been pursuing a multi-pronged approach to address the challenge. First, simple product market fit assessment uncovers the gaps in the consumer experience – the emphasis is on experience. No one wakes up excited about the act of payment, the payment is just a necessary step to access goods and services. In our industry, that act is shrouded in concerns about AML, KYC, and illicit finance. Our products and services need to be able to address that, and they do.
Second, our customers need to develop and begin to implement a digital strategy, which can be a challenge in the fast paced, resource constrained world we live in. This means that it needs to be seen as a priority, as well as having skills on board to respond. Third, we need the regulatory framework to enable change, particularly when the underlying regulations have been centred around consumer and data protection from more of an accounting perspective (with technology moats around the regulated systems), rather than a banking centric view. This change and the skillset to support it can be a challenge.
For the second and third prongs, the key word is: knowledge. From many perspectives, the knowledge is missing, so Everi’s role and goals have been focused on education. We do demos, go to trade shows, do more demos, publish articles, do more demos, and we partner with the vendor community to do webinars and – you guessed it – more demos. At the end of the day, industry change requires industry participation, and we have had amazing partners in making progress!
How is Everi embracing the growing applications of AI in its cashless and FinTech suite?
AI is a very rapidly evolving technology and, as such, it represents a challenge to a slowly changing industry. We are actively working AI into business and engineering processes in a manner consistent with our market-leading security and controls discipline. We also work with our vendors and suppliers to seek improvements to our processes. From fraud to compliance, to business process automation – we will look at all our options to enhance security, productivity, and enhanced experiences for our customers and their patrons!