CASH ACCESS STRATEGY
ultimately accept or decline it. Consider: • Does increasing CA fees result in less cash to the gaming floor, or does reducing fees result in a surge of cash to the gaming floor? • How does this play out across individual POIs?
• Is the patron chasing his or her bet or exhausted all or most of their CA options? • Is the patron even aware of all the CA options? • Does the patron have a marker or credit? • How much cash did the patron bring? • How much was his or her last CA transaction? • Can the patron fish for an authorization approval in private versus at the cashier? • How long has he or she been playing? • What is his or her average bet and average tip after a win? • What was his or her budget for the trip? • Does behavior and or data lead management to believe patron has a gambling problem?
This all plays into the concept of “fee
elasticity”: lower CA fees equals more cash to the floor, thus more incremental gaming
revenue. This hotly debated topic becomes harder to support when you understand the psychology behind when, why, and how patrons accept to pay what some suggest are exorbitant CA and associated transaction fees. GEs must strive to be informed and vendors of CA services must accelerate their development to provide solutions capable of facilitating sophisticated analytic tools and dynamic fee options. Properly designed solutions dilute the argument that lower CA fees increase cash to the floor. There is no reason why a well-armed GE cannot increase CA fees and deliver incremental cash to the gaming floor while providing an exceptional patron experience.
Cash access technology and “smart solutions”
Unfortunately for GEs around the globe, the
technology surrounding payment systems—and particularly CA solutions—has been stagnant. Historically, local banks provided standard POS devices and merchant services to GEs as part of a broader banking relationship to facilitate
GEs have suffered uniquely as banks only
reluctantly provide CA services due to the potential brand risk associated with responsible gaming and problem gambling. As a result, banks haven’t invested in technology for the
debit and credit card cash advances. This model remains true in dozens of markets around the world. In more advanced CA markets, proprietary software has been developed by Value Added Resellers (VARs) to provide added functionality to the transaction process, benefiting both the patron and the operator. VARs become the Merchant Services Provider (MSP) to the GE, and the VAR negotiates an MSP agreement with a large local payment processor or bank. Although a step up from standard POS devices, legacy VAR systems are tired, represent serious PCI risk, offer little to know customer behavior analytics and pale in comparison to the innovation we see in the broader merchant-processing vertical where the likes of Stripe, Braintree, and CardConnect seem to evolve and offer exciting new technology on a daily basis.
26 JANUARY 2017
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