Every single UK bank and building society is theoretically capable of receiving a payment of up to £250,000 instantly thanks to the implementation of Faster Payments nationwide.
There is an upper time limit of waiting two hours, but that is only due to some compliance checks needing to be made in some cases. Depending on the bank there may also be delays on the weekends.
That £250,000 figure is the limitation of the Faster Payments Service itself, individual banks and building societies may have lower limits according to their preferences but those limits should be serviceable for most transactions
Online casino withdrawals are processed in a similar way to any other online transaction. It’s a digital transaction made between customers and a merchant, so for the vast majority of withdrawals there is nothing significant about what’s happening.
However, the average withdrawal takes between 1 and 5 days, far longer than it takes for a customer to deposit their cash to make a bet and far longer than the potential promised by Faster Payments.
So why, if it’s a simple transaction, does it take so long for some gaming operators to move money into customer accounts?
There are two overarching issues at play, compliance and the technology stack.
Compliance Checks Take Time
Compliance is no surprise. Casinos must make sure that there’s nothing suspicious about the withdrawal, that no patterns of abuse are in place, that no money laundering activity is ongoing.
These have traditionally required extensive checks carried out manually by compliance officers, with little to no automation involved in the process.
The reasons for compliance are layered; operators need to make sure that there is no fraud taking place and that the account has not been taken over by a third party.
They also need to make sure that first-party fraud is not an issue. Making sure that the money is being withdrawn to the correct account has traditionally been a painstaking manual issue for compliance officers.
But that no longer needs to be the case. With jumps in compliance automation and document validation, the manual process work of compliance officers can be reduced.
That’s why some gaming operators are able to offer fast withdrawals as a feature.
Using products such as Card Check, gaming operators can carry out compliance checks to detect potential fraud at pace without needing to spend up to five days on making sure that they’re transferring the money to the correct account.
They’re the ones who have bolstered their know your customer (KYC) workflow with products that are able to validate customers at speed.
It also means that they ensure the withdrawal is paying out to the correct customer and as a result eliminates account takeover as a risk.
By examining the end-to-end journey that a customer takes rather than only focusing on the initial onboarding process, gaming operators are able to deliver a better experience for customers that leads to them receiving faster withdrawals of their winnings.
The Technology is Here
Technology holds gaming operators back because they’re not updating their tech stack.
The gaming industry in the UK has a gross gambling yield of £14.2 billion from April 2019 to March 2020. That figure represents thousands of transactions, but with better withdrawal technology it could see a significant increase as customers become more enamoured with their gaming provider.
The delays around faster withdrawals create the illusion that some online casinos are able to offer fast or instant withdrawals while others are not, but that isn’t the case.
This technology is available to all gaming operators, it’s just an issue of whether or not they’ve chosen to integrate it into their offering.
Part of this is because they struggle to handle the compliance side of the withdrawals, but by updating their KYC workflow to working with KYC providers that truly understand the digital space, faster payments should be available for every operator across the UK.
Any online gaming operator worth their salt has the capacity to offer quick withdrawals, it’s simply a matter of updating their technology stack to work with Faster Payments.
The only reason why a withdrawal may be purposefully slowed down is if there are compliance issues at play and with the right KYC workflow in place, even that is no longer a strong reason for delaying payment.
