Payments and cashier

PSP: the casino's payment provider

PSP (Payment Service Provider) is a company that processes a casino's payments: it takes deposits and sends payouts via cards, bank transfers, e-wallets and local methods. The PSP determines fees, the share of approved payments and the set of methods in each country.

Yevhen SychovOctober 2026

What a PSP does

A PSP connects a casino to cards, bank transfers, e-wallets and local methods through a single integration. It processes deposits, sends payouts, returns the payment status and handles card disputes.

For banks and card schemes, gambling is a high-risk category: more chargebacks, stricter merchant checks, higher fees and reserves. Not every PSP works with casinos, and not in every country: it depends on the operator's licence and the market's rules.

What it costs

  • Transaction fee: a percentage of the amount, a fixed part or both. Payouts, refunds, chargebacks and currency conversion are charged separately.
  • Rolling reserve: the PSP holds back part of the volume for a set period as insurance against chargebacks. The operator cannot use this money.
Reserve balance = monthly volume x reserve percentage x months heldFor example, €200,000 of deposits a month and a 10% reserve for 6 months: €20,000 is held back every month, and after six months €120,000 sits in the reserve at all times.

Why several PSPs

The share of approved payments at a PSP varies by country, bank, method and card type. One provider processes one GEO well and another badly. So operators connect several PSPs and set up:

  • Routing: a payment goes to the PSP with the best approval rate and price for that country, bank and method.
  • Cascading: a payment that the first PSP declined for a technical reason goes to the second one without the player re-entering their details.

A second PSP is also insurance: if the first one closes the merchant account or goes down, the cashier keeps taking money.

Common mistakes

  • Choosing on fees. For example, on €100,000 of deposit attempts, an 80% approval rate at a 3% fee yields €77,600, while a 70% approval rate at a 2.5% fee yields only €68,250. Lost deposits cost more than the fee you saved.
  • One PSP for everything. A closed merchant account stops deposits the same day.
  • The reserve is not in the financial plan. Six months of holdback freezes a noticeable share of volume, and this has to be built into cash flow in advance.
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