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Embrace Cashless in Your Casino

Prepare for the inevitable adoption and implementation of a virtual wallet.

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Casinos often face challenges around cashless technology:

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

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • The cashless casino is a necessary modernization initiative that can be realized when digital and mobile strategies intersect.
  • Properties need to prepare to offer virtual wallets or risk negative impacts to their operational efficiencies, guest expectations, revenue, and regulatory mandates.

Impact and Result

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

Embrace Cashless in Your Casino Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should embrace (or prepare to embrace) cashless virtual wallets at your casino. Review Info-Tech’s methodology and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

1. Cashless Is Queen

Understand the benefits of cashless technology for your casino property and guests. Map how virtual wallets will impact guest and operational experiences.

2. Identifying and Overcoming Barriers to Cashless

Align with your key stakeholders to ensure operational staff and guests are educated to adopt and embrace cashless technology. Assess the impact of adopting virtual wallets on your property’s technological health and risk management.

3. Identifying Cashless Options and Vendors

Understand the role of casino management system providers and payment solution providers in enabling virtual gaming wallets, including the various options that are available through several vendors.

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The best part of the experience was the excellent facilitation of this process with Monica. She was very patient and thought provoking as she has a... Read More


Embrace Cashless in Your Casino

Prepare for the inevitable adoption and implementation of a virtual wallet.

Table of Contents

3 Executive Brief 52 Step 2.1: Aligning With Key Stakeholders
4 Analyst Perspective 74 Phase 3: Identifying Cashless Options and Vendors
5 Executive Summary 75 Step 3.1: Casino Management System Providers
23 Phase 1: Cashless Is Queen 85 Step 3.2: Payment Solution Providers
24 Step 1.1: Cashless Across the Property 94 Summary of Accomplishment
35 Step 1.2: Mapping the Impact of Cashless 95 Additional Support
50 Phase 2: Identifying and Overcoming Barriers to Cashless 99 Bibliography

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst Perspective

Modernizing how guests pay to play is a must.

Making the choice to pursue cashless should not be done half-heartedly or simply to keep up with your competitors’ offerings. Selecting a cashless vendor is like selecting a CMS. Your property will be intertwining itself with the vendor, impacting the way your property operates and your guests play for years to come. Ensure you select a vendor that will support the direction your property is moving in for the next five to 10 years. The COVID-19 pandemic may have made cashless a more prominent component of your casino’s digital, mobile, and/or customer experience strategies, but that does not mean it should be rushed to completion. If anything, COVID-19 has highlighted how important it is to implement this properly.

In the end, though, your property will inevitably need to adopt cashless virtual wallets to stay relevant in the competitive hospitality and entertainment industry. Prepare for that moment by understanding how all the components and stakeholders of cashless interact.

Photo of Larry Fretz, Practice Lead, Gaming & Hospitality (GHRC), Info-Tech Research Group. Larry Fretz
Practice Lead, Gaming & Hospitality (GHRC)
Info-Tech Research Group
Photo of Brittany Lutes, Research Analyst, Gaming & Hospitality, Info-Tech Research Group. Brittany Lutes
Research Analyst, Gaming & Hospitality
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge
  • 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.
Common Obstacles
  • 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.
Info-Tech’s Approach
  • 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.

Info-Tech Insight

The cashless casino is a necessary modernization initiative that can be realized when digital and mobile strategies intersect. Properties need to prepare to offer virtual wallets or risk negative impacts to their operational efficiencies, guest expectations, revenue generation, and regulatory mandates.

Your challenge

This research is designed to help casino operators that are facing cashless challenges.
  • 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)
Casinos are unique from other entertainment venues – they have always asked their customers to exchange their cash for alternative forms of payment: chips, tokens, and even tickets.

“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.”

(Bill Miller, AGA’s President and CEO (Source: Perry, 2020))

Common obstacles

These barriers make this challenge difficult to address for many organizations:
  • 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.
Your property cannot afford to avoid payment modernization.

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)

Concept model for 'Embrace Cashless in your Casino', 'Cashless casino is a necessary modernization initiative that is realized through the intersection of a property's mobile and digital strategies.' Main branches off of 'Cashless Casino' are 'Improved Guest Experience', 'Realized Operational Efficiencies', 'Optimized Technology Capabilities', 'Enhanced Risk Management', and 'Payment Processing/Clearing'.

What is considered “cashless?”

A form of contactless payment

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.

Definition: The process of enabling customers to engage in various forms of casino games without needing to handle physical cash funds.

Payments being leveraged:

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

The importance of cashless

Why should your casino be discussing its implementation and adoption?
  • 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.
“From an operator perspective, the cashless solution improves player engagement, personalizes marketing, and reduces the friction in onboarding younger demographics.” (Dave Bontempo, 2020)

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

MEMBER RATING

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Overall Impact

$129,999
Average $ Saved

120
Average Days Saved

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve.

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What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst

Get the help you need in this 3-phase advisory process. You'll receive 9 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1: Prepare for Cashless
  • Call 1: Discuss cashless casino and gain an understanding of where your organization is currently.
  • Call 2: Create a Cashless Working Group.
  • Call 3: Identify your cashless market segments.

Guided Implementation 2: Identify and Overcome Barriers
  • Call 1: Conduct a journey map and calculate the impact of ATM fees on your business.
  • Call 2: Create an education plan and identify which market segments should be leveraged in a focus group.
  • Call 3: Determine your current technology’s health, opportunities, and threats.
  • Call 4: Actively consider new regulations and update your Risk Manual.

Guided Implementation 3: Identify Cashless Options and Vendors
  • Call 1: Determine which vendors your property will leverage for cashless technology.
  • Call 2: Decide whether to move forward with cashless technology now or wait.

Authors

Larry Fretz

Brittany Lutes

Contributors

  • BJ Bouscher, VP of IT, Firekeepers Casino and Hotel
  • Steve Reese, CIO, SUNS Legacy Partners, LLC
  • Sasha Purico, CTO, Philadelphia 76ers
  • Jeffrey Hoss, VP of Business Development, Everi
  • Christopher Justice, President, Global Payments Gaming Solutions
  • Sina Miri, Aristocrat Technologies Inc.
  • Michael Jungen, Aristocrat Technologies Inc.
  • Sanja Nedeljkovic, Aristocrat Technologies Inc.
  • Chris Cleveland, Product Manager, Aristocrat Technologies Inc.
  • Cath Burns, EVP of Customer Experience, Aristocrat Technologies Inc.
  • Jared Mayberry, SVP of Customer Experience, Aristocrat Technologies Inc.
  • Anthony Rabito, President, FABICash
  • Amber Allan, Systems Business Operations Manager, Konami
  • Joseph Dominquez, Systems Business Operations Executive, Konami
  • David Ledford, VP of IT, Cherokee Nation Entertainment
  • Tony Gawne, Director of IT, Chickasaw Nation
  • Michael Ratner, Director of Product Management – Systems Commercialization, IGT
  • Ted Keenan, VP of Product Management, Scientific Games
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