Why iGaming payment solutions struggle across global markets
As instant bank transfers and pay by bank options surge across global iGaming markets in 2026, the figures back up what the industry has been saying for a while. Trustly alone crossed $100 billion in pay by bank transaction volume in 2024, a 50 per cent increase on the year before, while Juniper Research projects global account to account transactions to climb to 186 billion by 2029, up from 60 billion in 2024. Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that many operators are launching these payment rails on little more than hope that an integration proven in one market will carry over into the next.
SiGMA News sat down exclusively with Ran Rachlin, CEO and Co-Founder of Ubertesters, to get to the bottom of why that assumption keeps letting operators down. Over the course of the interview, Rachlin explained where localised crowd testing has exposed problems that lab testing simply never catches: local payment rails failing quietly behind an otherwise polished Payment Service Provider (PSP) integration, false declines dressed up as fraud prevention, live betting windows lost to a stray network delay, Know Your Customer (KYC) checks that reject genuine players over something as small as a badly lit passport photo, and the modest UX fixes that can lift an operator’s approval rate from the mid 70s to well past 90 per cent.
One feature, many markets
Rachlin is blunt: payment integration is never a single feature.“It’s not a one integration. It’s dozens of local integrations that are trying to use the same UI and UX, but it’s a different process in each location.”
Operators often assume that because pay by bank works smoothly in the UK, it will behave the same way in Ghana or Argentina. Rachlin further highlighted that devices fragment too: a payment flow might run flawlessly on the latest iPhone in Germany but fail outright on an older model elsewhere or let one card through while declining another that looks identical on paper.
When global PSPs meet local reality
Canada offers a cautionary tale. Interac is the payment method Canadian players trust and expect, and most PSPs will confidently confirm they support it. The trouble is that Interac isn’t a single integration. It requires routing through the actual bank and a specific process.
Latin America presents another challenge. A PSP might claim regional coverage by citing support for Pix and Boleto in Brazil, or for OXXO Pay and SPEI in Mexico. Still, each of those methods has its own settlement behaviour and journey. A transaction that clears instantly in Brazil might take hours in Mexico. Clients are increasingly asking to test country by country rather than “Latin America” as a bloc, because a payment method fully tested in one market may barely have been tested in another.
Rachlin stated, “There is no such thing as a truly global payment experience. Crowd testing doesn’t validate a payment integration against its technical specification; it validates it against the real world, using real people, real bank accounts, and real devices. Payment localisation is not about availability; it’s about usability.”
Fraud engines or false declines?
Abandoned deposits are often blamed on fraud. But Ranchlin argues otherwise: “I don’t think that fraud is the main reason behind all the failed transactions or deposits,” he stated. Anti fraud systems, built to satisfy an increasingly compliance heavy environment, tend to be overly conservative, and the fallout lands on legitimate players who are asked to complete extra verification steps for no good reason.
A mismatched billing address, a ZIP code that doesn’t fit the expected format, or a device location that conflicts with a virtual private network (VPN) can all be enough to trigger a false flag. The same card type can succeed for five testers and fail for three others entirely because of how conservatively the fraud engine has been tuned. The result: frustrated players lose patience and move to a competitor, since few will wait around when the market is full of alternatives.
Live betting’s unforgiving window
Live betting magnifies the stake. A five second gap to place a bet during the final moments of a match leaves no room for friction: any delay doesn’t just slow the transaction; it kills the bet outright.
What is important to note is that the problem is rarely created by one reason. The problem could be caused by any of the variables listed above, including the site, the PSP, the player’s bank, 3D Secure, which requires an SMS code, or just the player’s mobile network being down. As Rachlin pointed out, there was a scenario in which a gambler missed out on a bet because his bank used an unanticipated biometric verification technique.
In Africa, reliance on SMS verification and older 2G/3G networks compounds the issue: peak traffic during major events can cause verification texts to fail to arrive altogether. It’s the same operator and the same bet, but a completely different handshake is happening behind the scenes depending on location.
Rachlin noted this is exactly why lab testing, run on stable Wi Fi with no time pressure, can never reproduce what happens when a 3D Secure handshake breaks under real peak time load. Only real testers, on real devices, real carriers, and real banks in the actual target market can catch it. He adds that demand for this kind of testing has shifted markedly in recent years, from being centred on North America and Europe towards Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
When verification turns players away
Tighter KYC and anti-money laundering (AML) rules in 2026 mean compliance checks are now woven directly into the payment flow, and Rachlin’s central claim here is simple. “KYC failures are very often not compliance failures,” he explained. “It’s basically a usability failure; every additional verification step, however necessary from a regulatory standpoint, is another potential point of friction, and it should be kept to a minimum.”
Non-Latin alphabets, such as Arabic, Chinese, and Thai. Varying address formats, and ID documents all create friction. Even poor lighting in a passport photo can be enough to fail an otherwise legitimate verification attempt.
“Sometimes compliance and customer experience are competing with each other,” Rachlin noted. Players faced with six verification steps will go elsewhere, given how many alternatives exist.
Look beyond technical bugs
For an operator stuck at a 75 to 80 per cent approval rate, Rachlin advises against chasing technical bugs. The real gains come addressing soft declines: a 3D Secure timeout, an SMS that never arrives, a network spike during live betting, a VPN flag.
His advice is simple: take genuine users from an operator’s top five markets and have them complete the entire deposit experience across multiple devices over a few days. The fixes that emerge, he claims, are rarely platform rebuilds. More commonly, they are minor tweaks to the checkout process itself.
“Don’t optimise your system based on assumptions,” Rachlin stated. “Optimise it based on real customer behaviour. In iGaming, the payment is not a transaction; it’s a product experience,” he explained. If the payment fails, the product fails, and unlike a purchase on a trusted retail platform, there’s rarely a second chance to win that player back.
Subscribe HERE to SiGMA’s Top 10 News countdown and SiGMA’s weekly newsletter to stay up to date with all the latest iGaming News from the world’s iGaming authority, and benefit from subscriber-only offers.
