Worldpay report: Gamers want faster, seamless payments

Optimising and personalising the payments experience for gamers is key to increasing loyalty and conversion rates, according to a new report by payments leader Worldpay.

Insights about gaming payments trends are contained in the Payments Performance Gaming Report, Little Updates Bigger Wins, which stresses the importance of convenience, security and personalising pay-in and payout experiences.

The report shows optimising user experience by storing payment details is important to 84 per cent of online players, who prefer to reduce the lengthy task of resubmitting details.

The speed of the payment process is also key, with 30 per cent of players saying they would abandon a bet if they were under time pressure and their payment was declined. This number increases to 43 per cent in France, and 45 per cent in Australia.

Worldpay’s Australia and New Zealand commercial vice president, Paul Koopmans, said choosing the right payments partner could not only increase customer loyalty but also reduce costs and fraud.

“By adopting an optimisation-focused approach to payments, merchants can drive more revenue and reduce costs, allowing them to invest in initiatives that enhance the customer experience,” Koopmans said.

“Drawing on our deep industry experience and knowledge from working with over 200 gaming operators globally, this new report provides businesses with actionable insights to help them avoid reworking their payment infrastructure, but instead focus on updates that deliver bigger wins.

“Finding efficiencies and carving out opportunities is critical for operators looking to pull ahead from competitors. For example, boosting authorisation rates by improving transaction routing, automatically updating expired cards and minimising false declines all make a difference to the bottom-line.”

Worldpay provides payments solutions to more than a million merchants globally in 146 countries, including Australia.

Mr Koopmans said maximizing acceptance and removing unnecessary friction was vital to retaining customers, with 47 per cent of respondents saying they would abandon a purchase if the transaction needed multiple attempts to go through. Other influencing factors included too many payments steps, being redirecting to a separate website and cumbersome two-factor authentication.

He said robust fraud prevention measures and continuous monitoring of fraud rates also helped gaming businesses avoid increasing declines.

“This means getting ahead of fraud and using analytics to refine back-end payment processes,” Koopmans said. “Declined transactions can lead to lost sales, customer frustration and operational inefficiencies that drive up costs.

“With Network Payment Tokens, operators can enhance authorisation rates and the customer experience by reducing friction associated with Strong Customer Authentication (SCA).”