Pay N Play 2.0: The New User Onboarding System Taking the Netherlands Gambling Industry by Storm

Ever since gambling went digital, onboarding has been one of the most important components of acquiring new users to one’s playing system. Players may at first be drawn in by your offers or the slick new games you have as an operator, yet if they find the signing-up process too lengthy or convoluted, they are likely to give up before they become registered users.

Indeed, research from Jumio highlights how operators struggle with the onboarding process. It found 16% of customers abandon registration processes before completion. And even if they do make it to the end, there’s no guarantee they will spend: 19% of those that completed registration failed to make a deposit.

This problem has also recently been exacerbated by extra layers of checks and inspections, which, although important to protect player safety (especially regarding fraud), can slow down the process significantly.

Pay N Play 2.0

However, a Swedish fintech company called Trustly believe they have created an onboarding product that streamlines and accelerates the process, reducing churn for operators significantly. The product is a new version of its existing Pay N Play system developed some years earlier and is simply called Pay N Play 2.0. Indeed, by using this system, Trustly says it can cut onboarding down to three minutes (data from the Netherlands).

Regular onboarding processes are lengthy because many separate documents must be verified to join a gambling site. These include affordability checks and checks that look into one’s traceability and legal rights.

According to Vasilije Lekovic, Vice President of gaming at Trustly, Pay N Play works differently from traditional onboarding solutions. With the Pay N Play system, there’s no need to fill out registration forms when signing up. A player simply clicks “play now” and makes a deposit from their online bank account via Trustly. The best part for operators is all the KYC checks are completed automatically via Pay N Play in the background.

Lekovic says, “It hasn’t just streamlined registration and deposit into a single flow,” “It’s fast, and it hides complexity from users. Friction, lag time, unnecessary redirects – every hurdle is going to lose users. Pay N Play has been so successful because it quickly delivers a new user into a verified user who is ready to start playing.”

How it works

How, then, does this system work? Well, according to Trustly, the rapid onboarding is underpinned by a robust verification framework that lies just under the surface of the user interface. According to Vasilije Lekovic, “In the Netherlands, Pay N Play 2.0 combines KYC data from three separate sources into a single onboarding flow”. “It gathers information from the user’s bank, iDIN, local digital authentication service, and an ID scan taken with the user’s phone, all streamlined in Trustly’s Pay N Play flow.

He goes on to say, “It combines what is available through open banking and our AIS (Account Information Service) capabilities with other KYC data from different sources, as well as the passport/ID scanning and verification that we integrated as part of our Pay N Play onboarding flow.”

Before we get too excited about this product, however, it is worth pointing out that at the moment, Pay N Play 2.0 still only works in the Netherlands and has yet to be fully launched there, where there is a centralized ID database of all the citizens in the country. Applying this technology to Germany or the UK would represent a completely different set of challenges.

That being said, Lekovic has said that “There are similar sources of information [to the national registries] in different territories,”. “How Trustly collects the necessary data is partially from the bank, and we’re combining this with the third-party provider data. We are working on expanding Pay N Play 2.0 across these regions in 2023.”

Taking for granted for now that the launch and adoption of the system go well in the Netherlands, Trustly has said that it believes this product could be launched in multiple countries, including eventually the UK and the US. So, watch this space as you, too, may soon be onboarding new customers in under three minutes.