Digital wallets have shifted from a side feature to a default payment method for many players, and iGaming operators now face a sharper question about their next wallet stack: build it or integrate it. For many brands, the starting point is no longer card processing alone, since modern iGaming payment solutions sit between KYC checks, risk controls, player experience, and payout speed. At the same time, these payment solutions have to stay almost invisible for players while giving finance, risk, and compliance teams enough traceability to sleep at night.
Global context makes this choice more urgent. A recent global payments study from BCG estimates that global payments revenue reached about 1.93 trillion dollars in 2024 and will keep rising as digital and instant rails spread across regions. A Digital Wallet Market Report projects digital wallet services at roughly 56.8 billion dollars of revenue in 2025, with strong double-digit growth ahead. At the same time, a Mastercard chargeback analysis warns that businesses could lose 15 billion dollars this year to fraudulent chargebacks, with global dispute volume expected to rise about 24% by 2028. Put together, wallets sit right where growth, regulation, and fraud pressure meet.
With that backdrop, the build versus integrate decision is no longer just an engineering topic. It is a strategic call about risk, speed, and how much complexity a gambling business wants to hold inside its own teams. Clear thinking about iGaming payment solutions now decides which operators expand cleanly into new markets and which ones get stuck in constant payment fires.
What an iGaming wallet has to handle now
A decade ago, a wallet on a gambling site mostly meant storing card tokens and a basic balance per player. Today, it has to connect identity checks, payment routing, compliance rules, and front-end flows in one clear sequence. It needs to support cards, open banking, local alternatives, digital wallets, and sometimes crypto, where local rules allow it, while keeping latency low and player friction under control.
Limits are more complex, too. Deposit and loss limits may vary by jurisdiction, game type, time of day, and player risk band. A strong wallet tracks those limits in close to real time, blocks risky combinations before they hit the ledger, and passes clean data into AML monitoring, tax reporting, and responsible gaming tools. It also needs alerting and dashboards that help teams spot device changes, sudden stake spikes, or withdrawal patterns that hint at fraud or distress, then react with clear playbooks instead of one-off patches.
This complexity keeps growing as regulators tighten expectations around strong customer authentication, audit trails, and access to account data. A homegrown wallet that depends on one narrow integration or manual checks can work for a while, but it can also become brittle when card network rules or local guidance change quickly. That is where the build versus integrate decision becomes very real.
Building a wallet in-house
Building in-house gives a gambling brand deep control. Product teams can shape deposit and withdrawal journeys around loyalty rules, responsible gaming tools, and VIP handling in ways that match their audience. Risk and compliance specialists can change rules and review queues without waiting for vendor releases, and data teams can join wallet events with product analytics on their own schedule.
The trade-offs are serious. An internal wallet needs steady attention to fraud models, scheme rule changes, new payment methods, and reconciliation flows. When something breaks, the help desk and finance teams feel it at once. In a sector where dispute rates can climb quickly, and high-risk categories attract sophisticated fraud, every weak spot in the wallet can turn into lost revenue or license pressure. That is why even strong in-house teams often plug their custom wallets into external iGaming payment solutions for risk tools, regional routing, or specific payment types instead of trying to build every feature from scratch.
For operators with robust engineering and payment staff, a build approach can still be attractive, especially when they want one wallet to cover several brands or verticals under tight control. The key is to be honest about what will stay core and what will still come from third parties, so that “build” does not quietly turn into “build and then maintain dozens of fragile integrations”.
Integrating with a specialist provider
Integration starts from a different premise. Instead of writing every ledger, limit rule, and payout flow internally, the operator connects to a specialist payment partner that already runs wallet infrastructure for high-risk, high-volume merchants. Providers such as Tranzzo design their iGaming payment solutions to support quick onboarding of new payment methods, routing between acquirers, and built-in tools for monitoring chargebacks and fraud signals. For a mid-sized operator entering new regions, this can shorten launch timelines and reduce the number of contracts, local integrations, and dashboards that teams must watch each day.
A partner-led model can also strengthen resilience. When a bank or acquirer in one market has problems, routing can move to fallback connections, so players do not see long outages or repeated declines. The same platform often supports instant payouts, partial withdrawals, and currency conversion, which are hard to maintain in a custom build as jurisdictions and scheme rules change. To avoid dependency risk, operators still need people inside the business who own payment performance, review data, and challenge vendors on approval rates, fraud losses, and compliance tasks.
A short checklist can help teams choose a path:
- How many markets need coverage in the next three years, and how complex are their payment and gambling rules.
- Which skills already exist around payments, risk, and compliance, and where are the gaps.
- How quickly new payment types need to be added for players, and who will track local preferences.
- What level of control is required over KYC flows, responsible gaming tools, and withdrawal policies.
So, build or integrate
There is no single correct answer. Large, mature operators with strong internal talent might keep building their own wallets while still relying on external iGaming payment solutions for specific countries or specialist services. Newer brands, or teams that need to move quickly into regulated markets, are more likely to start with a trusted provider and later bring selected parts in-house once the business is stable. What matters is to treat the wallet as strategic infrastructure, not background plumbing, and to pick a build versus integrate mix that can carry the next decade of iGaming growth without constant payment fire drills.