The New Systems

The brick-and-mortar U.S gambling market has seen a lot of technology shifts over the years, but linked loyalty systems, AI and cashless payments may represent titanic changes for the sector.

The American Gaming Association’s State of the Industry report published in February showed 2024 slot machine revenue of $36.06 billion nationally, an increase of 1.6 percent over the previous year. Table games revenue fell by 1.7 percent to $10.14 billion.

Total in-person gaming—consisting of casino slots, tables and retail sports betting—added up to $50.32 billion in industry revenue last year.

As markets like the Las Vegas Strip and Atlantic City report decreasing revenue, operators will look to drive efficiencies and player values through new tech-driven solutions.

Connecting the Casino Floor

The modern casino floor continues to add webs of connectivity with each passing year.

Slot machines feed back live spin data, while loyalty programs track players across all resort spending points. Handling all these endpoints has become an increasingly complicated and risky task for operators.

IGT’s upcoming CMS software Advantage X converts standard services, such as accounting, ticketing and table management, into a microservice architecture.

This shifts the floor’s network away from single endpoint communication to a service bus architecture. Through this system, machines on the floor will connect to the central service bus that holds instances of function applications.

Jacob Lanning, senior director of new business, payments, at IGT, says that this improves efficiencies in a number of areas, as upgrades can be done at the microservice level with minimal wider distribution. Additionally, if one instance of a microservice is getting caught up or slowed down, the system can correct it by automatically spinning up a new one.

“It makes scalability work really well,” Lanning adds, “because a lot of the services can scale up and scale down based on the volumes that are going on in the casino in an automated fashion. It recognizes that transaction volume is getting higher, so it spins up more versions of the service to support that load.”

From the operator’s point of view, this potentially means greater system reliability and longer up times. Operators also are looking to decrease any friction points on the floor and speed up customer experiences.

Minnesota-based software group CasinoTrac has partnered with Transact Technologies to include its promotional bonusing software suite Epicentral in its offering. Through this, operators can customize TITO tickets and print on demand, whether those are bonuses for players based on achievement or a tax form for a taxable jackpot.

CasinoTrac VP of Commercial Strategy Jeff Baldi says the company has reduced the time needed to process a taxable jackpot from a 20-minute transaction down to 60 seconds, including the mandatory filing of W-2 G tax forms.

“We unlock the game, we put the credits on the credit meter, and the player’s playing again in less than a minute, compared to 20 minutes of paperwork and tax forms and security guards and everything happening,” Baldi says. “We do it all at the game, and that’s really making a big splash from our customers that are using it.”

Under its partnership with Centennial Gaming Systems, CasinoTrac has converted its promotional kiosk and reprint enrollment kiosk into one platform.

“Now you can use one cabinet, one kiosk for promotional as well new player enrollment and card reprinting, which is about 80 percent of all the transactions at a players club.”

Loyalty Systems

Loyalty systems have always been an important means for operators to reward customers and create return customers.

In many cases when gamblers stick a loyalty card into a machine, they play, finish the session and leave. The machine adjusts its player data, and the loyalty account is updated with any bonuses or subsequent earnings. One issue is that the player may not know that they have earned the next tier in the loyalty program, which is computed after the card has been pulled.

As a result, the casino will try to communicate with that player after the fact to congratulate or detail the reward. In some cases, that player may never know they reached a new status.

“If you think about the core of what a loyalty program is intended to do, you want to take that experience—them getting to that next tier—and be able to celebrate it immediately,” IGT’s Lanning says.

“The problem is these back-end systems have no knowledge of it until the session ends. With this new system, those messages are being processed in real time as they’re happening, as they’re hitting a spin or earning so many points. We know all of those things.”

Because operators can build programs that track those achievements in real time, they can inform the customer through the machine that they have reached a higher level or celebrate that moment with them through personal contact.

When it comes to getting physical gifts into gamblers’ hands, CasinoTrac has partnered with the InfiGifts gifting platform. Not all operators have space to warehouse T-shirts, mugs or more lavish retail gifts on site. The

InfiGifts platform will store information and distribute the gift to a player’s home or chosen address.

“We make an offer to a player, they interact with the inVegas platform through our promotional kiosk, and then we handle all the fulfillment and customer service for shipping and everything straight to that player’s house, instead of them having to carry around a Crock-Pot,” CasinoTrac’s Baldi explains.

Integrating All Aspects

Casino floors and wider resorts are becoming more integrated in how they track customer spend across multiple channels and in how they reward that spend.

MGM Resorts CEO Bill Hornbuckle has been vocal about the need to bridge the gap between digital and retail casino innovation. Hornbuckle has stated that there is an experiential evolution taking place—and the gambling industry is now in that phase.

To embody this “revolution,” MGM Resorts and its online-facing JV, BetMGM, have been promoting rewards programs that see players earn credits across both channels. These can unlock invites to concerts and sporting events or extended stays at MGM resorts.

Suppliers have been integrating wider resort operations into CMS platforms as they also move in this direction.

IGT’s Lanning says its system has been designed to connect with third-party systems that the resort or casino is also utilizing.

“We can interface into a number of different point-of-sale systems—for example, sports betting systems, hotel systems, spa or golf, anywhere that the customer could spend while they’re at an integrated resort property. All of those have interfaces into our solution, and then we have the ability to track those custom ratings and tie custom point-earning rates to each one of those,” he explains.

These types of systems represent a shift toward meeting expectations of casinos and customers. They create a connected ecosystem of play, leisure and rewards, an infrastructure where casinos can design a loyalty system that encompasses the entire casino spend—not just the slot or table spend.

Facial Recognition

Facial recognition technology is not new to the industry. It has been widely used by casinos for security, as well as at the cash or reception desks.

According to Tom Soukup, chief systems product officer for Konami Gaming, Inc., the company’s tech group is currently piloting facial recognition on slot machines in casinos in Singapore. It is being used to enable proper application of tax rates.

“They don’t trust that people aren’t sharing their cards,” Soukup says. “With facial recognition, if I’m a premium player and I’ve logged in via my face, then my entire session can go at the lower tax rate.”

Konami is letting those beta test sites run as it looks to refine the slot machine facial recognition system, which can be influenced by lighting conditions. Once it’s past beta, Konami plans to introduce the technology to the North American markets.

Soukup notes that there are qualms around using facial recognition, with privacy questions from operators about whether or not customers are going to accept it. However, he points to its current wider use for security in casinos, noting that this could add an extra layer.

“Right now, it’s pretty rampant that people are sharing their cards to get to a higher tier level,” Soukup says. “They will give it to someone who’s uncarded, and they get the points and (all the benefits). So, this really does solve that problem for the casinos; you are who you are with facial recognition.”

Facial recognition technology integration into slot machines or floor-based gaming systems could also benefit uncarded players. If a gambler is uncarded and plays a machine using facial recognition, they can be tracked by the face ID and offered promotions based on play, without ever having to give a name or address.

Moving to Cashless Payments

The move to cashless payments by the sector has been somewhat sluggish, despite an increasingly digitized society that has become familiar with cashless payments.

The pandemic raised consumer awareness and ability to use cashless payments, but casinos have been somewhat slow to adopt. At the Global Gaming Expo in 2023, Northern Quest Resort & Casino Director of Table Games Kevin Zenishek said that only 5 percent or so of tribal operators had adopted cashless systems.

Among the reasons for a slow uptake are outdated systems, the associated cost of revamping infrastructures, and simply a nostalgic view that cash and chips are part of the casino experience.

Cashless innovation is making headway, meanwhile, across other industries. Capital One research stated that in March 2025 nearly half of U.S. consumers (47.8 percent) had not made cash purchases in an average week.

One element that might be putting gamblers off is the extra restriction and regulation that initially comes with setting cashless wagering. In Nevada, a player could see the process as intrusive, as they have to go to the cage and sign a number of forms; basically, they have to be vetted on the spot.

While the industry has not reached where cashless is going in other sectors, Konami has created a system in partnership with payment processors that allows gamblers to scan a QR code on the player tracking LCD display. It brings them to a payment processor site that allows them to drop money straight into the slot machine.

Konami also offers its Money Clip feature to operators, which enables cashless payments at tables and slots via third-party payment providers.

Konami’s Soukup notes how the cruise industry is miles ahead of casinos in the cashless movement.

“As far as cashless goes, the cruise industry does it better than anybody else in the world,” he says. “They just really make it convenient for the player. But that is a set of known players.”

While the cruise industry has a captive market and knows its potential players before it even sets sail in most cases, casinos have players fluxing in and out of their systems. IGT’s Lanning says that the onboarding process needs to be refined for wider uptake.

“We just recently have released and are in the process of working with the operators that we have live to deploy our automated KYC solution, similar to what you might find in sports betting or iGaming,” Lanning says.

“An app provider has allowed you to scan your ID and do face recognition to enroll into a program without ever stepping foot inside of a building. We’re bringing that same technology to land-based casinos to make the enrollment process much more seamless and easier than it is.”