Cashless gaming lets players pay at slot machines and card tables from a digital wallet on their phone or on a card, instead of carrying cash. It is also called cashless wagering. The wallet is run by the casino. Players load it from a bank account or a debit card, or with notes at a kiosk, a machine on the casino floor that accepts cash.
Why does a casino want this? A casino handles a great deal of cash. Its staff must count the notes, guard them, move them and store them. Players must queue at the casino's cash desk, called the cage, to change notes into chips or paper tickets. Cash also makes it hard to know where money came from.
Take, for example, a player at a casino in Detroit, in the American state of Michigan. Before she arrives, she opens the casino's app and moves $200 from her bank account into her casino wallet. The app has already checked her identity, because the wallet holds real money. At a slot machine, she scans a QR code on the machine's screen with her phone. She chooses $50, and the machine shows $50 of credit within a few seconds. When she stops playing, she sends what is left, say $38, back to her wallet. From there she can move it back to her bank account.
Every transfer is recorded in the casino management system, against her player account. So the casino has a full record of where each dollar came from and where it went. This record helps with AML transaction monitoring. A payment from a bank account can be traced, but a bundle of notes cannot.
Cashless wallets also make limits possible. In the app, a player can set the most money she may load in a day or a week. She can also block herself from playing for a time. These tools are part of responsible gambling. But critics worry that paying from a phone, as with any digital wallet, makes spending feel less real than handing over notes. So regulators set rules on how a casino wallet may be loaded. Some do not allow it to be loaded from a credit card.
Some makers also run systems that give approved players credit, which is money the casino lends and the player repays later. Many of these products are built by engineers in Chennai and Hyderabad, for casinos in America.