Resorts World Casino Goes Cashless With Play+

When it opens on June 24, Resorts World Las Vegas will be the first US casino with a fully integrated cashless gaming system thanks in part to Sightline Payments Play+ technology.

As stated in a press release, Resorts World will deliver “a completely seamless cashless wagering experience via GamingPlay, the resort’s digital gaming wallet, and card-less logins for Genting Rewards loyalty members.”

“Launching cashless gaming solutions at the first major Las Vegas casino opening in a decade presents a tremendous opportunity for Sightline to further the digital transformation of the consumer experience in gaming,” Joe Pappano, CEO of Sightline Payments, said in the press release. “Resorts World Las Vegas will spotlight the impact that payments innovations can have on the integrated casino resort to the entire gaming industry. We are proud to launch the Resorts World Las Vegas Play+ program alongside this historic opening.”

But at the end of the day, the transition to cashless casino gaming is bigger than Resorts World. It provides the industry with the modernization, financial, and responsible gaming tools required in 2021 and beyond.

Betting USA spoke with Sightline SVP Strategic Development and Government Affairs Jonathan Michaels to better understand the cashless gaming system at Resorts World and how cashless gaming will impact the gaming industry.

An Introduction to Play+

A fully integrated cashless gaming option is only as good as its structure, and Play+ appears to tick off all the boxes, easy to use, safe and secure, and a full suite of funding options.

Jonathan Michaels:

“Play+ is a debit solution. A patron signs up for an account, in this case at Resorts World, and we create an account for them with the bank, providing them with full FDIC protection.

“What that account enables them to do is to seamlessly transfer money in and out of a wagering account. And the great part about Play+ is that since it’s a debit account, you can use it at any point of sale nationwide.

“Resorts World just launched the Resorts World Las Vegas app. That’s the first step of your journey. You download the app before you arrive, and because Nevada has an in-person registration requirement, you sign up for a loyalty account when you arrive. From there, you find a Play+ ambassador on the floor who will help you finalize setting up your account. Once you’re all set up, you fund your account, and you can go to any slot machine or table game and transfer funds into your wagering account and transfer them back and use those funds anywhere across the resort that has a point of sale terminal.

“When you sign-up, we send you an email with all of your credentials for your debit account, which you can immediately add to the digital wallet, be it Apple Pay, Google Pay, and the like.”

Play+ at Resorts World

Resorts World won’t be the first casino with cashless gaming, but it will have the distinction of being the first fully-integrated cashless resort.

Jonathan Michaels:

“You’ve seen a couple of cashless, wagering technologies launched at other properties, but even the stuff we’ve previously done has been limited to the gaming floor. Across the resort, you can use credit cards and traditional non-cash payment methods, but this will be the first wall-to-wall solution that you can use across the entire resort. Resorts World is essentially the first casino in the world where you don’t need to bring cash to do anything across the property.”

The Industry Is Coming Around… Finally

Even with it being the centerpiece of the AGA’s current CEO, Bill Miller, it’s been a slow slog to get the industry to buy into cashless gaming.

Jonathan Michaels:

“I think the big reason is inertia. The classic objects at rest stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. In the case of the gaming industry, there were two outside forces. One was the PASPA decision in 2018, and the other was COVID.

“What you saw in 2018 was, “oh my God, sports betting,” and how do we access this with payments being kind of the spine of that, as you need to put money in and take money out of a digital gaming account. As operators saw the success of that, they became more and more comfortable with it and said, how do we connect this all together?

“At the AGA, we had a payments modernization working group that was formed in 2019. And you saw all sorts of consumer trends go away from cash and towards contactless. There’s research from the AGA, Visa, and MasterCard showing 60% of patrons are more likely to use contactless payment methods.

“Then, with the pandemic and people moving away from cash, casinos were asking themselves, how do we operationalize this?

“At the end of the day, it’s a mobile-first experience. Ultimately hotel keys are going to go away. Loyalty cards are going to go away. Everything is going to be handled with a phone, so casinos shouldn’t be different from how you interact with virtually everything else in your life right now.

The RG Component

Cashless gaming is beneficial on another front: responsible gaming. With better tracking comes better data, and with better data, the industry will be able to make better decisions.

Jonathan Michaels:

“I think what digital payments can do is really revolutionize responsible gaming measures. I think they can provide greater insights into player behavior, and certainly, we’re engaged in a project at UNLV called the IGI Payments Collaborative, which Global Payments is also funding. We’re taking years of payments data and putting it together and giving it to UNLV  so they can track it to see if there is more harm in different payments behaviors, whether that’s increased deposits or frequencies or things like that. And then ultimately, you know, how we can build safeguards to help those types of outcomes.”

Some other ways digital payments provide consumers with tools to gamble responsibly are:

• Digital options empower customers with robust tools to self-monitor and govern their own spending and gaming behavior.
• Guests can track spending, set daily or hourly spending limits, and more.
• Financial institutions put in limits in place based on a guest’s risk profile and financial history, which includes restrictions of overall spend using digital payment options.
• Casinos will have increased visibility and tools to ensure that guests are gaming responsibly.

Jonathan Michaels:

“Essentially, anybody signing up for an account has a daily and monthly limit in terms of deposits, and that can be scaled based off of higher-level players, but generally, it’s a $2,000 daily limit maximum.”

For VIPs and other patrons who may need to access more than $2,000 per day (a professional poker player looking to enter a World Series of Poker event), Sightline has protocols in place.

Jonathan Michaels:

“We have our standard program, and then we have kind of a premium program for higher-level customers. There is additional KYC and source of funds and things like that that could scale up for the highest-level player.”

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