PayNearMe targets payment friction to boost igaming margins
Currently, igaming operators invest heavily in player acquisition, but according to PayNearMe, one persistent challenge continues to undermine those efforts: a poor payment experience. In a market where every dollar spent on marketing needs to convert, the payment experience is emerging as a critical — yet often under-optimized — part of the player journey.
“Think about where costs are coming from,” says Anne Hay, Chief Marketing Officer at PayNearMe. “It’s not the transaction when it goes through — it’s when it doesn’t. Every failed deposit is a lost bet, a frustrated player, and revenue left on the table.”
To help address this, many operators have adopted payment platforms that can route transactions across multiple processors. While this improves redundancy and success rates, it does not address the broader, more complex issues contributing to payment friction. These include fraud controls, reconciliation processes, backend inefficiencies, and lackluster user experiences.
“There are a lot of things around payments that operators have historically seen as just the cost of doing business,” Hay notes. “But when you add up the time and resources spent on customer support for deposit and payout issues, chargeback management, or fraud-related processes like manual reviews, the impact on both cost and player experience is significant.”
Failed or delayed transactions also increase risk exposure. If fraud filters are too strict, legitimate players get blocked. If they’re too lenient, fraud slips through. Both scenarios erode trust and profitability.
“Friction in payments is especially damaging in this industry,” Hay says. “Players expect instant deposits. If they encounter any issues, they’re likely to go to another platform — and they rarely come back.”
From an operational standpoint, payment failures create a ripple effect across support teams, fraud operations, and finance. Redundancy mechanisms like smart routing can help mitigate processor downtime, but effective payment experiences require more than transactional efficiency.
Increasingly, technology platforms like PayNearMe are layering fraud mitigation, data analytics, and automation on top of orchestration to manage the full scope of payment operations — from front-end user experience to back-office reconciliation.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is also playing a growing role in the gaming industry. Like many companies, PayNearMe uses AI to enhance the player experience and increase operational efficiency. The company is experimenting with large language models to improve data analysis, automate workflows, and identify patterns in payment behavior that drive better experiences. Hay believes the time to start is now.
“AI is still in the early stages,” she acknowledges. “But if you’re not at least experimenting with it, you are already behind. The opportunity to use AI to improve the player experience, reduce fraud, and enhance operational efficiency is real.”
As player expectations grow and acquisition costs continue to climb, operators may find that optimizing the end-to-end payment experience is key to driving sustainable profitability.
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