We recently received a comment following up on Josh’s piece on cashless gaming, which in the place he found placed a lot of emphasis on the use of a phone, among other things. A few questions arose:
I do not like the fact that it’s linked to a bank account — kinda like carrying your ATM card. It limits how one can perhaps control limitations per day/trip. Also, when I’m gambling, usually my phone isn’t out unless I’m filming a bonus. Otherwise it’s put away… Would there be a solution that fits better?
Carolyn C.
These are some great questions, Carolyn, and the answer is one of those times where it depends on the system what’s available, but the concerns you raised have multiple potential ways forward, allowing you to still leverage the cashless options that are available.
So far, whether it’s online gaming or cashless gaming in a casino, we’ve always seen the ability to set limits on deposits within a time window, such as per day or per month.
This is an important consideration, as it can put those guardrails into place that we manually do as players when we go to a casino with cash and without our ATM card, for instance.
Even more critically, these limits usually can’t be updated right away – there’s what’s known as a “cooling off” period, usually a few days to a week, where the changes you make to those limits don’t kick in until the cooling off period has completed.
That way, you can’t change your limit and pull money out while standing in the casino – it otherwise makes the limits pretty pointless.
We also have seen other ways outside of using a bank account to fund your cashless account, such as going to the cashier’s cage with your cash. So if you wish to avoid linking your personal bank account altogether, there are often other options to fund it.
Regarding the phone, the phone is central to some ways to leverage cashless gaming, but certainly not all. For instance, Carnival Cruise Line’s cashless system relies solely on your Sail & Sign Card and the touchscreen on the players card area of the slot.
This eliminates the need for using your phone at all, but if the touchscreen is miscalibrated or acting up, it can make it difficult to access your funds.
But that example is to underscore that there are different ways this process can work, even if you’re not carrying your phone.
Most importantly, unlike the switch from coin machines to ticket-in ticket-out (TITO) systems that are ubiquitous today, it’s not a hard cutover – cashless gaming sits atop the existing options, and we expect that to be the case for some time to come.
Cashless isn’t a new concept, but its interest picked up steam in the aftermath of the pandemic. Casinos and the technology companies equipping them with options have been moving slower and more deliberately to see how players use them, and we expect the solutions to continue to evolve and improve with time.
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