Station Casinos Teams With Trustly for Open Banking Payments

Trustly says it has been named payments provider for Station Casinos’ NFT loyalty marketplace.

The open banking payments company announced the partnership Wednesday (Aug. 23), saying it aimed to help the Las Vegas-based Station revamp its loyalty program, STN Charms.

“With STN Charms, players now receive digital charms as they play. As players win, the level of their STN Charms will increase,” the company said in a news release provided to PYMNTS.

“Players can then buy and sell these charms on the marketplace, leveraging Trustly’s open banking payments solution for digital deposits and withdrawals in the STN Charms wallets.”

According to the release, CentralAMS will facilitate the digital wallets on behalf of Station Casinos and serve as the merchant of record, and will to use Trustly as their exclusive payments provider for the project.

John Parsons, vice president of gaming at Trustly, noted that the partnership has allowed his company to demonstrate how open banking “can assist in creating a groundbreaking loyalty program by providing an integral payment system for its members-only marketplace.”

Earlier this year, Trustly announced it was working with online gaming operator PointsBet, to offer that company’s U.S. players real-time payouts.

As Trustly CEO Alex Gonthier told PYMNTS Karen Webster at the time, “in the gaming industry — and in lots of other industries — when gamers have won something, they want their money as quickly as possible.”

And those players want that money in their bank accounts, which he termed the “center” of individuals’ financial universes.

Webster spoke with Gonthier again last month for a wide-ranging interview about open banking, including the challenges of getting it to scale and some of its benefits.

Those include strong authentication controls, which remove unnecessary declines for merchants while protecting against fraud and bad actors.

“Because it’s the bank that goes to multifactor authentication or pushes the consumer through multifactor authentication, we have a very high degree of certainty that we know who is behind that device,” explained Gonthier. “And the consumer gets protected by law. Paying in the U.S. with a bank account entitles users to zero liability for 60 days. They can even go to their bank and ask for their money back.”