When a payment fails on Amazon, it’s annoying. When it fails on an iGaming platform, players start asking themselves a much harder question: can I actually trust this site with my money?

That’s the core insight driving Ran Rachlin, CEO of crowd testing firm Ubertesters, as he watches payment friction plague the iGaming industry. Operators often treat deposits, withdrawals, KYC checks, and payment options as technical checkboxes on a launch checklist. But real players experience them very differently, and that gap between operator intention and player perception is where trust gets damaged.

When Technology Works, But The Experience Doesn’t

Rachlin has spent over 25 years in technology and fintech leadership, and Ubertesters now conducts real-world testing across 180 countries. What he’s seeing in iGaming is striking: operators assume a payment flow will take five or ten minutes, but when actual testers move through it, they’re spending 50 minutes or an hour wrestling with unclear instructions, failed document uploads, or camera focus issues during KYC verification.

A paid tester will push through and complete the task. A real player won’t.

They’ll drop off after five minutes, and the operator has lost a customer.

“In iGaming, the payment flow is not just a simple transaction,” Rachlin explained. “It’s part of the whole product experience. It’s about trust.”

KYC Is The Real Bottleneck

When Rachlin asked his team to identify the biggest friction point in the iGaming payment journey, the answer was unanimous: KYC verification. From an operator’s perspective, asking a player to scan their ID or complete a selfie check seems straightforward. From a player’s perspective, it’s often a frustrating gauntlet of technical hiccups and unclear steps.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Operators send this feedback back to their KYC vendors, who insist everything is working perfectly on their end. The player journey is still breaking down, but the vendor’s metrics say nothing is wrong. Operators end up caught in the middle, unable to improve what users are experiencing because the third-party provider isn’t seeing the same problem.

Withdrawals Matter More Than You’d Think

Withdrawals rank as the second-biggest pain point, and for good reason. A failed deposit is frustrating, but a difficult withdrawal sends a different message entirely. Once a player has already jumped through KYC hoops and trusted the platform with their money, friction at withdrawal time can feel intentional. Like the operator is deliberately making it hard to get paid out.

Deposits come in third, typically due to card declines, failed payment attempts, or transactions that simply don’t process smoothly. By the time players reach this stage, they’re already evaluating whether the platform feels trustworthy enough to deposit real money into.

The Bigger Picture

What Rachlin’s observations reveal is this: payment friction in iGaming isn’t really a technical problem that needs a technical fix. It’s a trust problem that needs a user-centred fix. Operators who treat their payment flow as merely a compliance checkbox rather than a core part of the player experience will consistently underestimate how much friction they’re actually creating. Real-world testing, conducted by actual people moving through the actual journey, is the only way to close that gap and understand what players are really experiencing.

What the team thinks

Baz Hartley says:

Carl’s nailed something crucial here, and Rachlin’s spot on about trust being the real currency in iGaming. From my years examining terms and conditions, I’d add that payment friction often doubles as a deliberate friction point, where operators hide wagering requirement resets or withdrawal limits in confusing flows, turning a technical problem into a trust-destroying experience. The industry needs to recognize that seamless payments aren’t just about conversion rates, they’re about demonstrating to players that there’s nothing to hide.