iGaming Business magazine iGaming Business: Payments outlook 2017 | Page 2

Payments Outlook 2017

IGAMING PAYMENTS
IN 2017: CHALLENGES
AND TRENDS
Shemer Katz, General Manager, SafeCharge Israel, opens the Payments
Outlook 2017 with an overview of the igaming payments space in 2017,
mapping the main challenges, defining trends, emergent techniques and
potential disruptions.
Maximising conversions on a global level,
increasing ease and flexibility for players
and maintaining a consistent focus on
effective fraud prevention and compliance
solutions are just a few of the important
challenges facing gaming merchants today.
Leading up to 2017, a number of defining
trends have emerged, causing significant
changes to the payments landscape.
This has led to both card schemes and
payment solution providers generating new
approaches to address these changes.

Multi-channel payments
The importance of merchants enabling
players to pay anytime, anywhere across
multiple devices is still essential to ensuring
maximum conversions. In today’s hyperdynamic world, players demand a seamless
play-and-pay experience–payment services
must be available to them whether at home,
in-store or on their mobile devices. This
seamless payment experience must be
available to all players when making use of
multi-channel payment options.
With the influx of smarter mobile devices,
mobile payments are continuing to trend,
and we will continue to see rapid adoption
by merchants of innovative forms of in-app

mobile payment systems, such as Apple Pay,
Android Pay and others.

Transparency in payments
Transparency is one of the most pressing
issues when it comes to online payments.
Savvy merchants and players expect
transparency when it comes to the total fees
they will incur as well as real-time updates
per transaction. Payment providers are
realising just how important transparency
is, and have adapted back offices to provide
up-to-date information in regards to fees,
defined payment channels, financial reports
and available balances.

New techniques in fraud prevention
a) Authentication
The introduction of new regulatory measures
which require strong authentication for
e-commerce transactions makes this a
key focus for issuing and acquiring banks,
merchants and consumers in Europe. In
efforts to curb online fraud and reduce
risk while making online transactions,
issuers such as MasterCard and payments

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74 | iGamingBusiness | Issue 101 | November/December 2016

providers are putting a number of measures
in place to meet the requirements of the
European PSD21 and European Banking
Authority (EBA) guidelines.2 Both entities
define authentication through two of the
three factors:
• A piece of information only the user
knows such as a passcode or PIN;
• An object only the user possesses; like
mobile phone or token; or
• An identifier unique to the user, such as
a fingerprint.
MasterCard has already launched a
number of measures throughout Europe to
address these more stringent authentication
requirements:
• An identification check alongside online
purchases - shoppers are requested to submit
a selfie as an additional form of identification;
• Dynamic passwords, offering higher
levels of security than static passwords.
Building in these extra levels of
authentication is important and it is
imperative that these additional processes
do not impair the seamless experience
provided to merchants.
b) Machine learning
An emerging fraud prevention technique
called machine learning is currently
trending in the risk management space.

1
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/documents/econ/dv/compromisetext_/compromisetext_en.pdf
http://www.eba.europa.eu/documents/10180/934179/EBA-GL-2014-12+%28Guidelines+on+the+security+of+internet+payments%29.
pdf/f27bf266-580a-4ad0-aaec-59ce52286af0