• You are unable to offer the necessary variety of payment options for guests.
• The organization’s leadership has not bought into the idea of a cashless guest experience.
• Your hospitality and entertainment competitors are already providing low-friction cashless payment options.
• The industry is not providing clarity around which cashless methods exist how and they can be pursued in a legally acceptable way.

• The presence of virtual wallets in North American casinos was practically non-existent prior to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
• Selecting the right method and vendor to support your preferred method can be challenging.
• A cashless casino needs to be an imbedded component of your property’s overall digital and mobile strategies.
• The expected adoption of cashless technology and virtual wallets by guests was originally perceived to be quite low.

• Identify the value of a cashless casino to your organization and be able to communicate that value with leadership to gain buy-in.
• Ensure your organization has considered all the potential roadblocks to going cashless and identified possible solutions to overcoming these obstacles.
• Select a cashless casino approach that will be well-received by the organization and your guests.

• Casino properties have been unwilling and/or unable to modernize their payment options for guests for several years, despite other hospitality and entertainment industry competitors (as well as society in general) increasingly going digital.
• There has been an ongoing lack of interest in modernizing payment methods on the part of casino executive leadership.
• It’s relatively unclear what types of cashless methods exist, meet regulatory requirements, are user-friendly, and are likely to be easily adopted by guests.
• One operator indicated they were facing “two years of digital adoption in two months once COVID-19 hit.”(TribalNet, Cashless Casino Session, 2020)

“The COVID-19 pandemic made it all the more important to advance our efforts to provide customers with the payment choice they are more comfortable with and have increasingly come to expect in their daily lives.”

• The COVID-19 pandemic has put pressure on the gaming industry in North America to adopt safe gaming practices, and cashless gaming is one of those practices.
• Cashless gaming cannot be a standalone strategy. It needs to be an embedded component of the organization’s overall digital and customer experience strategies, which will require significant cross-department collaboration.
• Issues around privacy, responsible gaming, anti-money laundering, and guests’ lack of knowledge of and capability in using digital tools have prevented cashless gaming from being adopted. So the implementation of cashless gaming in North America is still a relatively unknown undertaking.
• Organizations are reluctant to invest in virtual wallets, since this technology has little known research on how it will likely be adopted.

72% — Percentage of all respondents that indicated they were “somewhat likely” or “very likely” to use cashless payments, if available. (Source: Yogonet Gaming News, 2020)

26 million — The number of mobile transactions Starbucks had in the first year it launched a virtual wallet—in 2010. (Source: Starbucks, 2011)

Other terms being used for cashless:

• Virtual wallet: E-Wallets are regulated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which will provide a money transmitter license.
• Cardless casino: The most well-known term and related to IGT’s platform, this technology enables the guest to leverage their mobile device as a form of loyalty card and digital wallet.
• Virtual casino: Uninhibited by the walls of a traditional casino, a virtual casino enables guests to play both the casino’s on-premises and online games from the same virtual wallet.

$1.5 Trillion — The projected worth of U.S. contactless payments by 2024 (Source: Juniper Research, 2020)

Sources:
Stutz, The Nevada Independent, 2020.
Gruetze, 2018.
Bontempo, 2020.
The Associated Press, "Casinos push for cashless gambling payments,” 2020.

Payments being leveraged:

• Debit
• Credit
• Apply Pay
• Google Pay
• PayPal
• Electronic Fund Transfer/ACH
• Pre-funded card
• Casino credit markers

• While conversations about cashless might have become more frequent due to safety concerns prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the reality is the world was already increasingly becoming cashless.
• The gaming industry, which is notoriously slow with regards to digital adoption, can now demonstrate to their guests that they can provide the cashless technology necessary for easy playing.
• While the example of Starbucks’ mobile payment is infamous, they hardly have the legal, financial, or regulatory compliance obligations that casinos have.
• Making purchasing gaming credits or chips as easy as ordering morning coffee shows guests that their experiences matter.
• The original reason why ticket-in, ticket-out (TITO) systems were so readily accepted was the added convenience. No longer were guests required to carry around buckets or pockets full of coins and bills. Cashless gaming will have similar appeal.