Gambling With Mobile Payments May Be Huge
For anyone out there who’s played a little blackjack lately, or even hit a slot machine, you’ll know firsthand that gambling can be a fun and potentially very dangerous activity.
For years, ATMs have been a big part of gambling, but new reports suggest that mobile payments are gaining ground in this field thanks to several separate developments.
Recently, Oxygen8’s head of payments Kevin Dawson talked to CalvinAyre.com’s Rebecca Liggero, offering up comment on the status of mobile payments as relates to gambling. So-called “charge to mobile” operations were still being carefully considered by the players, even in the United Kingdom, where mobile payments in general have advanced a great deal.
However, there are some markets that are making the move, a development that’s giving gaming operations a lot of extra food for thought, and from some unexpected sources.
We all know that Africa is an increasingly large market for mobile payments, and gambling is no exception. Large portions of Africa depend on mobile commerce, so Africa using mobile payments in gambling is no different than many places turning to cash instead.
Thus, as Dawson put it, mobile is the “key emerging marketplace in the region.” Africa wasn’t alone, however; Scandinavia—Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland—are increasingly getting behind mobile payments as well. Indeed, Duncan noted that the UK could learn a few lessons from the Scandinavian nations on how to work mobile payments with gambling.
The thing to remember here is that getting mobile payments involved in gambling isn’t just a technical issue, but it’s also an ethical and moral issue. Gambling has always carried, in many circles, a hint of the unethical, that little bit of thou-shalt-not that goes back a long way.
Any development, therefore, in its technology will have to overcome the resistance of regular users. At the same time, mobile is a field absolutely stuffed with possibilities for gambling.
Not only can it serve as the payment vector for real-world gaming—consider the thought of a set of QR codes at every table, and players needing only to scan said codes for an equivalent amount of chips—it can also serve as the platform for gambling itself.
It’s not hard to play a game of blackjack online, and many other casino classics are likewise easy to bring in. From poker to pai gow, it can be fairly easily converted to an HTML5 game and put online, with users able to bet real money on the outcome in a heartbeat. Assuming, of course, the laws don’t get in the way.
In a lot of ways, the connection of mobile payments and gambling still has a long way to come. Advancements have already been made, however, and more are likely to follow as the technology improves and perceptions change to match.