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In 2024, commercial gaming revenue in the US hit a record of around $72 billion, the fourth straight year of all-time highs, according to the American Gaming Association. A growing share of that total now comes from digital products.
A world of one-tap online slots
Online casinos, table games, and especially online slots have become the main revenue engine for iGaming in states such as New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
In September 2025, legal online casinos in just seven US states generated close to $900 million in gross revenue in a single month.
It is strong year-over-year growth for a segment that is still geographically limited. At the same time, the US payments infrastructure is going through a quiet transformation.
Real-time payment networks like the RTP Network and the FedNow Service are moving from niche experiments to everyday rails for banks, fintechs, and digital wallets.
They cut the gap between wanting to play and having funds available down to just a few seconds.
In theory, that is a win for convenience. In practice, it raises a question that is starting to bother regulators, issuers, and technology providers.
In a world of one-tap deposits, where do you add the friction needed to protect players without breaking the iGaming business model?
An Online Slots Market Powered By Growth And Convenience
The big picture helps explain why the debate over payment friction is no longer abstract. According to the American Gaming Association’s tracker, the US commercial gaming industry generated about $71.9 billion in 2024, up 7.5 percent from 2023, with records in almost every segment.
Within that total, the online channel is growing faster than the average. In September 2025, online casinos operating in seven states, including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, brought in somewhere between $820 million and $900 million in gross revenue, maintaining double-digit annual growth in several markets.
In New Jersey, for example, monthly iGaming revenue already comfortably exceeds that of many individual land-based casinos, and the state is on track for another year above $2 billion in online revenue. Online slots sit at the core of this model.
They concentrate the bulk of play volume, offer relatively stable margins, and use a UX designed around fast cycles of bet, result, and new bet.
In an environment where the phone is the main access channel and the game lobby is two taps from the home screen, any extra friction at the moment of deposit or redeposit becomes a critical variable and directly affects churn risk.
From Healthy Friction To One-Tap Deposits
Historically, there was a kind of healthy friction embedded in gambling payment flows. Card deposits could be declined more often by issuers wary of MCC 7995, bank transfers required extra steps, and in many cases, there was a real gap between deciding to redeposit and seeing the balance back in the gaming account.
At the same time, player education shifted from how to play slots to how to play in a more structured way.
Content around bankroll management, volatility, and bonus optimization began to frame slot sessions less as pure entertainment and more as something to plan, with a budget, loss limits, and time on screen in mind.
Many of these guides, including Lewis Mitchell’s explainer on strategies for online slot play, walk readers through concepts like setting a fixed budget, adjusting stake size, and resisting the urge to redeposit after a big loss.
For payment providers, however, the challenge is to balance the removal of friction, which is no longer just a UX slogan and now touches consumer protection, with reputational and even regulatory risk for banks and acquirers.
The smoother and more instant these flows become, with settlement in seconds via real-time payment rails and wallets with stored cards, the harder it is to guarantee that consumers still have room to change their mind.
FedNow, RTP, And Wallets: The Balance Moves Faster
The technical backdrop to this debate is the rapid rise of instant payments. The RTP Network, operated by The Clearing House, processed about $481 billion in payments in Q2 2025 alone, a 195 percent jump in value compared to the previous quarter and an average of more than one million payments per day.
On the Federal Reserve side, the FedNow Service, launched in 2023, also gained traction in 2025.
Official data shows that in the second quarter of 2025, the service settled roughly 2.1 million payments, more than 60 percent growth in volume over the prior quarter, with a total value of around $245 billion and an increase of more than 400 percent in the average daily transaction value.
At the experience layer, digital wallets and banking apps put these rails behind increasingly simple interfaces. For users, the difference between topping up a streaming balance and adding funds to an online slots lobby is often just the merchant name on the confirmation screen.
In both cases, the expectation is the same: instant settlement.
The result is a system where the rail is real-time, but the policies that define which transactions should run on it are still being written, often in the wake of unilateral product decisions by operators and wallet providers.
The good news is that friction does not have to mean going back to queues and arbitrary delays. It can be smart, contextual, and designed around the same principles of safety and consumer protection that guide other products and services.
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