The online gambling industry has welcomed countless payment methods over the years. It has given birth to methods like Trustly and ecoPayz, both of which excel and probably wouldn’t be as popular as they are if not for this industry.
But one payment provider exceeds all of those. It’s much bigger, has a far greater influence, and owes its success almost entirely to online gambling. That payment method is Skrill, and its popularity may surprise you.
Skrill began its life as Moneybookers, a UK company that offered a multitude of payment services. It launched three years after PayPal and was initially touted as an alternative. In fact, Skrill’s success is heavily reliant on PayPal, and not for the reasons you might think.
In the early days, PayPal didn’t allow its services to be used for online gambling. It is an American company, after all, and gambling was frowned upon in the US.
To understand why this was such a big deal, you need to think back to the early 2000s, to a time when online gambling was growing into the industry it is today, a time when services like Trustly, Interac, ecoPayz, and countless others simply didn’t exist.
Players and casinos alike were desperate for an alternative, and so they turned to services like Skrill (as well as its cousin, Neteller). From those early days, Skrill became the go-to payment method for this industry and became particularly popular across Europe. By the time PayPal changed its stance and allowed its services to be used for online gambling, Skrill was already being used on most casinos and by most players, so many were reluctant to change.
That’s why Skrill is far more common in the online casino industry and why you can use it to gamble on everything from real money slots and table games, to football matches and horse races like the Kentucky Derby.
Inaccessibility wasn’t the only thing that turned people away from PayPal. Some users had just grown weary of its services, deeming its customer support to be slow and tiresome and its features to be obsolete. In recent years, PayPal has invested a lot of money to improve that support while Skrill has lagged behind somewhat, but Skrill still performs well in other areas.
For one thing, it’s just as quick and convenient as PayPal. You can fund your account with a multitude of payment methods, including debit cards and bank transfers. This money can then be transferred instantly to a host of online casinos and it can also be used to make online purchases. You can also use prepaid cards and other features.
Skrill isn’t available on as many retail sites as PayPal but it’s far more common with casinos and sports books, so it’s always a good option to have.
It’s often said that fees are much lower with Skrill, but while this is true for some transfers and services, it doesn’t apply to all of them, and you may be stung if you’re using credit cards and processing payments in foreign currencies.
The biggest issue is the customer support, which is really bad with Skrill. It can take weeks to receive a reply and there’s no guarantee that reply will help you. But for all of the bad, there’s also a lot of good, especially where online gambling is concerned, and that’s why Skrill’s popularity has endured for so long.
As noted above, Skrill is currently available on most online casinos. It’s a fast and secure way to process payments and once you have winnings in your Skrill account, you can send it to your bank account or use it to make deposits elsewhere.
Skrill’s popularity has grown so much over the years that it is now one of the biggest financial services company in the world. In fact, it became so big that it bought out companies like Neteller and PaySafeCard, two other payment services that are popular in the online gambling industry.
Payment processing companies work with companies like Skrill to provide a multitude of services, which are then offered to casinos. It is a system that keeps the online gambling industry alive and ensures players always have plenty of safe and secure payment options.
If you are interested in even more entertainment-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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