ROI of Payment Gateways for Gambling — From Deposit to Lifetime Value

As you read this headline, somewhere in Peru, a player is trying to top up his account using his Interbank card. This is his second attempt. The first one failed. Within your BI system, this will appear as a “temporary drop in conversion rates for the region.” In his mind, it will look like, “Okay, screw this website.”

Now, here’s the $10,000 question: is this a UX problem, or has the payment architecture cracked?

Most likely, the latter. In the iGaming environment, before debating the flow and interface, a more fundamental yet costly question must be addressed: what is a payment gateway for gambling as a genuine mechanism that will either retain the customer or harm itself? Here’s a test: will your gateway handle a deposit attempt via an Interbank card in Peru if the player has Safari 13 and the backend is restarting the fraud system at that moment? In theory, yes. In practice, you lose the deposit, the player leaves, and you see this as “instability,” so you start fixing the interface. But what you need is a fallback.

Where Exactly Does the Money Disappear, and Why Can’t You See It?

Let’s consider a client from Mexico, March 2024. Before migrating to Tranzzo, — a payment provider for iGaming — the average approval rate for cards was 74%. The main reason for declines was the fraud filters of Sabadell and Santander banks, especially in the evenings (7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. GMT-6).

What happened in practice:

1. The deposit attempt froze for 11 seconds.
2. The player waited and complained to support.
3. Support did not understand what was going on. Both the player and the money left.

After implementing fallback routes and local methods (SPEI + OXXO):

• The approval rate increased to 91%.
• The number of support requests decreased by 43%.
• Return traffic increased by 12% (players who left came back)

And here’s the catch: the problem was not with the UX or the bank. It was in how the payment system responded to a refusal. If your system waits 11 seconds without a response, you’re already too late. The player’s mental timer is shorter than that.

Why ROI for a Gateway Isn’t About “Works/Doesn’t Work”

Here’s a common mistake. Companies think that a payment system is like Wi-Fi: if there’s a connection, everything’s fine. But if you’re an iGaming platform, you have seasonal peaks, high LTV users, chargeback risks, and crazy betting odds. Every failed transaction isn’t just a $20 loss. It’s a lost VIP with 5–10 failed attempts. And that means lost LTV.

And that’s no exaggeration. In January, a customer from Rio de Janeiro left after three consecutive declines. Two days later, his deposit appeared on another site. The loss was $600, potentially $3,000 over the quarter.

Here’s a simple calculation:

1. One VIP in Brazil makes 8 deposits per week
2. The average check is $75
3. One failed transaction = loss of 1–2 weeks’ turnover because it does not return

Now multiply that by 200 such players per month. See how the numbers grow? Furthermore, imagine that all this is due to a trivial timeout between the gateway and the local PIX network. That’s where you start to grasp what is a payment gateway for gambling as a living organism reacting to time, geography, and user expectations.

What Makes an Architectural Approach

Here’s how the approach looks in action, using Tranzzo as an example.

First, mapping. Not in general terms, but in specific areas: which banks, at what times, with what types of cards and devices. For example, Banco do Brasil gives a 406 error on Visa after 6 p.m. if the transaction is made from mobile Safari — this is known.

Following that, routes. If A fails (for example, Boleto freezes on Fridays after 5 p.m.), the system switches to a fallback via PIX. And all this without user involvement, without refreshing the page, without losing the shopping cart.

And finally, fraud filters that don’t just cut off. They look at: what device? What IP group? How did the customer behave last Tuesday? They learn and change.

And now the result. What the business gets:

1. +12–17% to revenue in South American markets (according to Tranzzo’s internal report for Q1 2025)
2. –40% in support costs because players simply don’t write
3. +3–5% in player retention (in the long-term LTV model, this is huge money, especially when it comes to the $500+ ARPPU segment)

And all this is not because of a new button. It’s because the payment system has finally ceased to be a black box. Because now your ops team doesn’t spend Monday mornings guessing why 37 transactions failed in Chile; and whether it’s the gateway, the bank, or the damn timezone shift.

Final Question

You are launching a new country. It has a different bank, different logic, and a different rhythm. Are you sure your gateway will adapt on its own?

Itau Bank in Brazil does not behave the same way as Ecobank in Kenya. In Malaysia, transactions via FPX freeze if the Safari browser is older than version 14. And the fallback to Paytm in India sometimes does not work if the IP range belongs to a VPN.

Before you can fix this, you need to understand how a gambling-focused payment system actually works under pressure: what it handles, what it misses, and what it breaks under pressure. APIs won’t tell you why a PIX route failed at 19:08. But your CFO will ask. Until you have tested it, everything else, from rates to UI, is built on sand.

Want to know if your checkout leaks money every Friday at 6 p.m.? Run a real test. Or keep wondering why your LATAM revenue doesn’t grow.