Coverage on a slide is not coverage on the cashier
“We have BLIK, transfers and cards” sometimes means: cards from tomorrow, BLIK after extra KYC, a transfer through a third intermediary with a daily limit. Ask for the method list split out: deposit / payout, countries live, countries on the roadmap, average onboarding time from the last quarter. If the provider will not give onboarding times from real iGaming rollouts, the map is decoration.
Who is licensed, and who is an intermediary
Payfac, PSP, acquirer and EMI are four different risks. The operator has to know who holds the funds, who reports to the scheme and who answers when a bank cuts the MCC. The contract should name the institution, the licence number and the jurisdiction. If five entities sit in the chain, any one of them can break the corridor. The longer the chain, the more important plan B is.
The deposit and payout split
Some providers take money in neatly and give it back poorly. The question is not “do you do payouts”. It is: what share of payouts land on time, what the limit per player is, whether the payout uses the same method, and what happens at the weekend. Plus: whether a deposit rollback blocks a payout on the merchant account.
Settlement and reserve
T+1 on a slide is often T+5 in an annex, plus a rolling reserve. The reserve has a release date and a rule for how it is calculated. Without that the operator’s CFO cannot count cash flow, and the payments team will be explaining money that sits with the provider.
Integration, webhooks, a report you can use
A sandbox with no chargeback webhook is useless in a dispute. Check: retry policy, idempotency, decline codes in the documentation, export to BI, fit with your cashier engine. Time from kick-off to the first live transaction depends on KYC and on whether your team has to write an adapter from scratch. A provider that does not show the error sequence will show it in production.
Price is not just a percentage
Interchange, scheme fee, rolling reserve, the chargeback fee, the payout fee, the currency fee, the monthly minimum. An operator with a small ticket on a local method can pay more on a “cheaper” PSP than on a more expensive one with better approval. We count cost per successful deposit and per amount paid out, not a slide that says 2.1%.
At the end we leave two finalists and run a proof on a limited geo or on one method. The winner is the one who delivers the SLA on the sample, not the one who sent the NDA faster.