It stands to reason that the easier it is to fund games at a casino, the more revenue the casino can generate through patron games.
That’s the foundation of Koin, a Las Vegas-based digital payment company that provides digital wallets for players that can be easily funded by banks, debit or credit cards, Paypal, Venmo, Apple Pay or Google Play.
Co-founded by company president Gary Larkin and casino entrepreneur Gary Ellis, who is best known as the top executive of the Ellis Island and Village Pub chain of taverns and cafes, Koin has proven its technology and is now positioned to expand into the industry.
Koin has been designed to enable the fastest, safest and most economical way for customers to fund games or make retail purchases anywhere, anytime using mobile wallets on their iOS and Android devices. A mobile app can be downloaded for free.
In an interview at Koin’s headquarters in Las Vegas, Larkin said casino companies have long recognized that they want to make it easier for customers to finance their gambling so they can focus on marketing slots, table games or sports betting.
“The industry has been looking for a while at trying to take money off the floor,” Larkin said. “How do we enable people to pay for their gaming activities the same way they pay for a Starbucks coffee or their groceries or tap and pay at a Costco gas station?”
Larkin said it’s more complicated at casinos because there are rules and legislation that prohibit the direct use of debit and credit cards on slot machines.
For that reason, critics of digital payment want guardrails in place to prevent gambling addicts from emptying their bank accounts directly into machines.
“Unlike normal retail where everyone connects via Visa or MasterCard, American Express or Discover, in the case of casinos, they’re all very internalized and once you’re inside a casino property, you don’t interact with the outside world other than maybe through an ATM,” Larkin said. “And it’s not the most efficient way to get money to play when you’re trying to have fun.”
Prior to co-founding Koin 2½ years ago, Larkin was involved in other digital payment platforms worldwide, working with institutions on three continents.
“So we started looking at how we could reinvent the whole infrastructure so that there would be more portability for the consumer and a way to create a relationship once that could then take them through many different properties and not just gaming, but all the restaurant activities all the nightclub activities and then when they move outside of those locations, how can they use that payment relationship or communication relationship that they had built to do other things,” he said.
In addition to the challenge of working in-game payment methods, Koin is confronted with integrating payment through manufacturers’ multiple operating systems.
“Terribly Complicated”
“Yeah, it’s terribly complicated,” Larkin said. “Most of the systems that power retail games, physical games, are highly arcane. They’ve been designed over decades to keep information internalized, to be very old-fashioned in their architecture, in their thought processes, and how they allowed interoperability with anyone outside of themselves. And working into those systems has been a learning exercise.”
Larkin admits that if he had known how complicated it would be to integrate casino payments before he started, he might have been too discouraged to even try to enter the market.
While some operators are protective about providing details of their casinos, Larkin says there is a genuine desire to make casinos cashless and that is what is driving them to consider Koin as a provider.
Koin operates out of downtown Henderson’s Emerald Island Casino and in November announced a new partnership with a tribal operation, Casino Pauma in Pauma Valley, California. It has also established a relationship with Euronet, the world’s largest ATM provider with operations in 197 countries.
As a result of some of the relationships in Las Vegas, mainstream casinos and Euronet, Larkin says Koin has the opportunity to expand exponentially.
Launching in Australia, Canada
“Euronet is a major global provider of payment solutions,” Larkin said. “They tend to be a back office provider as we call it. They provide the central transaction platform systems that run banks and processing centers globally. We wanted to have that enterprise class technology at our core and in doing that we also found our first major investor who has done two rounds of investment in Koin and enabled us to look more global in what we do. They are the second largest international owner of us and the world’s largest owner looking to help us and the world. markets like Australia where we hope to launch in late 2026.
“We also expect to move into Canada in ’26 and markets like Macao are on our radar, and while it’s a regulatory nightmare, at least we have the partnerships to be a supplier in those markets.”
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