When a payment fails on Amazon, most of us would agree it’s annoying. When a payment fails on an iGaming platform, that same glitch can set off alarm bells.
Maybe it’s a stalled deposit. Maybe a payment option customers are familiar with is missing. Maybe a player clears one identity check, then gets caught up in another before withdrawing their winnings.
An operator may chalk these things up to simple technical hiccups. However, from the user’s perspective, they can raise a pretty damaging question: Can I trust this platform with my money?
That psychological gap is exactly what Ran Rachlin, co-founder and CEO of crowd testing firm Ubertesters, sees when he looks at payment friction in iGaming.
In a wide-ranging interview with CasinoBeats, Rachlin said operators often treat deposits, withdrawals, know-your-customer (KYC) checks, and local payment options as just another set of technical steps in their launch plans.
However, add a real player to the mix and those moments quickly become tests of confidence, familiarity, and cultural fit.
“In iGaming, the payment flow is not just a simple transaction,” Rachlin said. “It’s part of the whole product experience. It’s about trust.”
Rachlin has led Ubertesters since 2014. The company provides crowdtesting and QA services that help businesses test digital quality, user experience, and payment reliability in real-world conditions across more than 180 countries.
He has more than 25 years of international executive experience across technology, fintech, gaming, and global business operations. Before launching Ubertesters, Rachlin held senior roles in the U.S. and Israel, including president and CEO of Mul-T-Lock USA, CEO of General Engineers, General Electric’s official representative in Israel, and global roles in sales, marketing, business development, and operations at Silicom and Mul-T-Lock.
Rachlin said Ubertesters’ project managers see iGaming payment friction follow a clear pattern: KYC comes first, followed by withdrawals, deposits, and payment-method selection.
These friction points might look random, but they’re not. There’s a clear emotional logic to the breakdown. The biggest trouble spots cluster around moments in the user journey when a player has to prove who they are, put money in, get money out, or decide whether the platform offers payment options that feel familiar enough to trust.
“In iGaming, when there’s friction, immediately all the hazard signals go off,” Rachlin said. “It’s a trust issue.”
Where the iGaming Payment Journey Breaks
When Rachlin asked five members of his team to name the most problematic stage of the iGaming payment journey, they didn’t hesitate.
“KYC, KYC,” he recalled. “There was no doubt about that.”
If you’ve ever had to scan an ID or complete a selfie check online, you’ll understand how easy it is to get tripped up as you go through the steps. No matter how hard you try, the camera just won’t focus. The lighting is off. A document upload fails. The instructions aren’t clear.
In the context of iGaming, what looks easy to the operator can feel slow, intrusive, or strangely fragile to the user.
“To the operator, it looks very easy,” Rachlin said. “KYC is nothing. It’s just a document, just a passport. But in reality, it’s very complicated.”
Rachlin said that friction becomes apparent in testing when a payment flow an operator thought would be quick and straightforward ends up taking much longer once real people are asked to complete it.
“You told me it’s going to be five or 10 minutes per tester,” he said, describing conversations about client expectations. “But in reality, the testers spent 50 minutes or one hour to test the app because parts of the process didn’t work.”
A paid tester will stick it out. After all, they’re getting paid. A player may just give up and leave the platform out of frustration.
“But a real user will never stay with it for 50 minutes,” Rachlin said. “They’ll drop off after five, and you’ve lost the customer.”
Even when testing surfaces those issues, operators can find themselves stuck between what users experienced and what a third-party vendor insists should have happened.
“We provide that feedback, and then they go back to the KYC company, and the KYC company will say, ‘For us, it’s working great. Nothing is wrong,” he said.
Those interactions leave operators with a familiar problem: the technology is working on the vendor’s side while the actual player journey is still breaking down.
Withdrawals are the second-biggest friction point, according to Rachlin’s team. It’s not hard to understand why.
A failed deposit is frustrating, but if a player has a hard time completing a withdrawal, especially after already going through verification, it can feel like the platform is intentionally putting up barriers between them and the money they believe is rightfully theirs.
Deposits were the third-biggest friction point, usually because cards fail, payment attempts are declined, or a transaction just doesn’t go as smoothly as expected.
The fourth pain point was the selection of the payment method itself. Rachlin explained that an operator may believe they’ve included the right options for the local market, but when users get to the payment screen, those options aren’t there.
The order of these steps can also play a role in whether users stay on an iGaming platform or leave.
“If the KYC appears immediately after registration,” he said, “users are more likely to drop off.” If it appears before withdrawal, he added, “the users are happy to do it because they see a certain benefit.”
Rachlin acknowledged that not all jurisdictions let operators delay that step. But his bigger point is that the very same verification step can feel very different to users depending on where it appears and what the player believes is waiting on the other side.
Why Flows That Pass QA Still Fail With Real Users
The payment journey has predictable breaking points, but Rachlin says operators often don’t see them because they’re too confident in controlled QA environments.
“When you talk about the QA lab, it’s a very clean, it’s a very predictable, it’s a very narrow environment to test,” he said.
In a lab setting, the devices are often new, there are a limited number of payment methods, and the testers already know how the process is supposed to work.
Rachlin said a QA lab may have “four or five devices, usually the top one,” while even “the richest companies will have only 10 devices.”
In this scenario, an operator can learn whether their system functions under ideal conditions. However, it won’t necessarily show them how it behaves across the uneven reality of global markets.
Rachlin told us that Ubertesters reviewed about 20 projects from the past year and found that the gap between what happens in the lab versus the real world is significant.
In a lab environment, payment-flow failure rates may look like 2% to 3%. Once those journeys are moved out of the lab and tested with real users, real cards, real local payment methods, and real-world conditions, the failure rate can jump up to 10% to 20%, he said.
“That is one of the major gaps,” Rachlin explained. He gave several reasons for these failures. Sometimes, a KYC check that works in perfect lighting on a high-end phone becomes much harder for a user to complete on an older device.
There are also cases where a payment method available on paper doesn’t appear in the actual market. A bank redirect may make a user feel uncomfortable, or network quality may change the outcome. Interruptions like a phone call mid-payment, a user switching devices, or someone simply losing confidence once the process stops behaving as expected can all change how that payment journey plays out in the real world.
Rachlin gave several examples from recent Ubertesters’ work.
In one U.S. casino flow, 20 testers were asked to register, play, complete KYC after winning, withdraw $100, and then deposit funds back into their balance. Five of the testers made it to the final stage, only to find that three different credit cards were rejected.
In another case, UK users were asked to test Apple Pay, but the payment method didn’t appear for them at all. He also pointed to situations where users were charged twice while trying to make a deposit.
These examples help explain why raw funnel data can’t tell the whole story. Operators can often see the point where users abandoned a flow. What they might not know is what caused them to leave.
“They can see where it happened,” Rachlin said. “They can see a drop-off point. The user did not complete the transaction. But they can’t see why the user gave up.”
A drop-off after KYC, an attempted deposit, or payment-method selection may look like a technical failure in the data. But underneath all of that could be a very different problem: the player lost confidence, the flow felt unfamiliar, or the platform no longer seemed worth the effort.
What Payment Choices Reveal About Trust Across Markets
A failed payment attempt isn’t the only reason players lose confidence in an iGaming platform. Sometimes, it’s because the payment option they expected to see is missing in the first place.
It’s easy for operators to assume they’ve handled market entry if they support the major global credit card brands. If Visa, Mastercard, American Express, perhaps PayPal, or Apple Pay are all there, they feel like they’ve checked the payments box.
Rachlin told us that misses the point of what local options mean to users.
“Local payment methods for the user, they mean trust,” he said. “It means, ‘I’m familiar with this method.’”
That preference for what’s familiar shows up in how users choose to pay. Rachlin said Ubertesters’ internal analysis suggests 60% to 70% of users choose a payment method they already know and trust, even when another option has lower fees.
“Let’s say, if I trust Visa, I will use Visa,” he said. “But if you also put a local payment method that I know, like, for example, in Spain, it’s called Bizum … it’s going to increase the conversion by 15% to 20%.”
He said that can hold even when the familiar method is more expensive, using a 5% versus 2% fee as an example.
But the most interesting part is how those preferences vary from one market to another.
“In markets like Germany or in Scandinavia, they usually prefer the bank-based [methods] … and for them, it means it’s a bank, it’s security, it’s transparent,” Rachlin said. “You talk about Latin America, it’s more cash-based. They like to work with vouchers and cash-based [options], and they trust it.”
There are even geographic differences in how much friction users will tolerate.
“North America, the UK, Spain, Western Europe — we all expect that the transaction [will be] fast, very low friction, still strong security layers, but invisible,” Rachlin said. “You go to Latin America, you go to Africa … they’re more comfortable with the multi-layer, multi-step delays … but on the other hand, they do expect to have very, very clear instructions.”
Those patterns don’t mean that every user in a region behaves the same way. However, they do suggest that payment design isn’t culturally neutral. The systems people trust are influenced by local infrastructure, their financial habits, and what has historically felt safe to them.
Localization Is More Than Translation
Rachlin said operators can also underestimate the extent to which localization can shape players’ trust in the payment experience on a platform. When he talks about localization, he doesn’t just mean translating words from one language to another.
Instead, he’s talking about the smaller, market-specific details that make a product feel natural to users, whether that’s currency formatting, local phrasing, or cultural cues that signal to a player that the platform was built with them in mind.
One example he gave us was of taking Spanish-language guidance that worked in Spain and applying it in Argentina without accounting for regional differences. The user may understand the words, he said, but still feel the product was written somewhere else, for someone else.
“They don’t feel comfortable,” Rachlin said, “because now this company has come from the other part of the world, and they want us to become clients, but they don’t really understand our culture.”
Localization can be especially important for iGaming platforms that are asking people to entrust them with their money. If the payment instructions feel stiff or poorly tuned to the market, the problem can be bigger than just awkward phrasing.
For Rachlin, localization is not just a nice-to-have after operators clear the technical and regulatory hurdles.
“You can meet all those technical regulations,” he said, “but you can still underperform in that market if you don’t match those specific local user behaviors [and] user requirements.”
A payment journey can work exactly as it should and still fail commercially. It can offer all the right tools but at the wrong time, in the wrong order, or with the wrong cultural assumptions.
In iGaming, Friction Becomes a Credibility Problem
If a payment doesn’t go through on Amazon, a shopper may assume the problem is on their end and try to troubleshoot it themselves. They know the platform, and it has the product they want, so there’s an incentive to keep trying.
“In e-commerce, if one card is not working, okay, I’ll replace the card,” Rachlin said. “Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe my card is a problem. It’s not the operator. It’s not Amazon. It’s me, it’s not you, it’s me.”
Rachlin said that in iGaming, the same type of friction can trigger a very different response from users. There’s a good chance a shopper will be patient with an e-commerce website, but on an iGaming platform, if a deposit stalls, a withdrawal feels harder than expected, or they don’t recognize the payment method, a player may just leave altogether.
“When they go to this new iGaming [site], and something doesn’t work,” he said, “they think, let me move to the next one. Let’s move from Betway to bet365. Let me move to 1xBet.”
That’s why Rachlin argues that payments shouldn’t be treated as something separate from the player experience.
“I make a deposit, I play the game, I can get my money back, everything works smoothly, this is my product experience,” he said, speaking from a player’s point of view. “I call my friend, and I say, ‘Listen, this platform works perfectly for me. I trust it. I’m going to proceed with it.”
That’s why Rachlin says identifying the source of the friction is important. In his view, in iGaming, a payment issue that begins as a technical issue can quickly become a question of whether a player still trusts the platform.
He estimated that 30% to 40% of the issues Ubertesters sees are straightforward technical failures, such as payment service provider errors, callback timeouts, or other system breaks.
But he believes the remaining 60% to 70% often come down to something else: unmet user expectations, confusing instructions, unfamiliar redirects, too many steps before payment, or signals that make the platform feel less trustworthy than it needs to.
It’s that split that gets to the heart of his argument. A failed iGaming transaction could very well expose a broken integration. But it could also reveal a deeper mismatch between how operators think payments work and how real users decide whether a platform deserves their trust.
And for Rachlin, that’s the mistake operators make when they treat payments as simply a technical rollout rather than a cultural and behavioral part of the product itself.
When platforms get it wrong, the player’s reaction can be brutally simple.
“Payment didn’t work,” Rachlin said. “I leave, I move on.”
