Gaming payment optimisation: how localisation and instant payouts drive player retention

When more than 65,000 gaming professionals converge, patterns emerge fast. At ICE Barcelona 2026, one signal cut through the noise: operators who treat payments as a performance lever, not just infrastructure, are pulling ahead.

Here's what separates them:

‍1. Trust is built through partners, not promises

As payments become more central to business performance, the choice of partners matters more than ever.

ICE conversations reflected a clear preference for trusted, long-term partners over short-term solutions. Operators are asking harder questions about experience, resilience, and consistency. What can they actually do with their network? Who has navigated multiple regulatory cycles? Who understands local nuances at scale? Who can improve performance steadily over time, not just in ideal conditions? 

In an environment where every optimisation counts, trust is not built through bold claims. It’s built through delivery, iteration, and a shared understanding that small improvements, applied consistently, create lasting advantage.

2. Every fraction of a percent now matters

Operators increasingly put their focus on even the smallest percentage improvement in payment success as they see that it has a measurable impact on revenue, retention, and lifetime value. At scale, those marginal gains compound quickly. A small reduction in failed deposits, fewer payout exceptions, or more reliable routing in one key market can materially shift the bottom line.

This is where experienced payment partners create real value, by combining local infrastructure, data-driven optimisation, and continuous product development to turn incremental improvements into sustained competitive advantage. At ICE, discussions leaned heavily toward optimisation rather than expansion for its own sake. Less “what else can we add?” and more “how do we make what we already have perform better?”

Product development, fine-tuning flows, and addressing local edge cases are no longer secondary tasks. They are central to growth strategies, particularly in regulated environments like gaming, where friction is expensive and trust is fragile.

3. Speed is expected. Dependability is differentiated.

Instant payments have moved from differentiator to baseline.

Players expect deposits to work immediately and payouts to arrive quickly. Any delay creates doubt, regardless of whether it’s caused by banking hours, routing issues, or compliance checks behind the scenes. From the player’s perspective, speed and trust are inseparable.

ICE made it clear that “instant” is not just about initiating a payment through Open Banking. Execution matters just as much: where funds are held, how they are routed, and whether transfers can happen locally rather than cross-border.

Operators are becoming more aware that two providers offering “instant payouts” can deliver vastly different real-world outcomes. Predictable performance, especially outside standard banking hours, is where real differentiation now lies. That predictability is built on strong payout infrastructure, a wide network of local bank accounts with built-in redundancy, combined with access to local and regional instant payment schemes.

This kind of setup already enables millions of payouts to be processed in seconds across European markets, delivering a truly instant experience players can rely on. For operators, the impact goes beyond speed: reliable payouts build trust, drive player loyalty, and encourage re-engagement, which, in turn, increases deposit frequency and overall volumes.

At ICE, it was clear that payout infrastructure is no longer a background capability. It’s a core competitive lever for operators who want to perform consistently at scale.

4. Localisation is no longer optional. It’s performance-critical

Another strong takeaway from ICE was the continued focus on localisation, not as a market-entry checkbox, but as a performance strategy.

Players behave locally. Banks operate locally. Regulation is enforced locally. Payment performance reflects all three.

Conversations around payout-only markets, IBAN discrimination, and settlement delays highlighted how global payment setups often fall short of local expectations. In contrast, operators seeing the strongest results are pairing local payment methods with Open Banking and truly instant local payouts. This is a model already  proven to work in markets like the Netherlands (iDEAL), Sweden (Swish), Portugal (MB Way), Poland (Blik), and Belgium (Bancontact)

What stood out at ICE is how powerful this combination becomes when deposits and payouts are treated as a single, coherent journey. Players who deposit through familiar local methods and then receive winnings instantly back to the same bank experience payments as seamless and trustworthy end to end. That consistency builds confidence, drives re-engagement, and results in higher retention and customer lifetime value.

Under the hood, this is enabled by domestic routing, local bank accounts, intrabank transfers, and access to local and regional instant payment schemes. For operators, the benefits compound: higher success rates, faster payouts, simpler reconciliation, improved cost efficiency, and, most importantly, more loyal players who come back and deposit again.

Localisation, done properly, reduces intermediaries, increases reliability, and unlocks incremental performance gains, without adding complexity elsewhere in the stack.

A more disciplined phase for gaming payments

ICE Barcelona didn’t signal a radical shift. It confirmed an evolution already underway.

Gaming payments are moving into a more disciplined phase, where success is defined by execution quality rather than experimentation. Speed is assumed. Trust is engineered. Localisation drives results. And optimisation is continuous.

For operators, the message is clear. Competitive advantage will come from sweating the details, partnering wisely, and recognising that in payments, small gains, delivered consistently, make a very big difference over time.

Want to improve your payments optimisation? Contact us.

‍