Sightline Payments announced an investment of up to $300m to implement cashless gaming at slots across the US, which it will do in collaboration with Acres Manufacturing. This investment undertaking will be called ‘Project 250’ and aims to facilitate digital payment technology at 250,000 slot machines nationwide.
Project 250 will allow gaming operators to upgrade existing slot machines via Acres Foundation and offer cashless features to their patrons, starting in approximately four months.
Sightline’s Mobile+ ecosystem provides seamless integration with the operator's consolidated casino resort and loyalty programs. Meanwhile, Sightline’s Play+ digital payments solutions complete the cashless experience. This payments ecosystem currently operates in four major casino management systems in the US.
The company states its payment solutions are innovative, based on a strong base layer of infrastructure critical to gaining widespread consumer adoption. Only casinos in 10 of the 44 states that offer gaming have launched cashless for their customers, and Sightline is targeting those who have yet to do so.
Sightline believes that casinos face a hurdle in upgrading their outdated infrastructure technology. It points to the slow adoption of EMV (Europay, Mastercard, Visa) chip payment being incorporated at point-of-sale devices in retail stores across the US. As EMV is now used by almost every retail store in the US, so too will cashless payments at casinos, according to Sightline.
Sightline co-CEO Omer Sattar commented: “It’s the hardware and associated capital expenditures that’s often the impediment to the large-scale deployment of cashless payments for gaming operators.
“This investment by Sightline through the creation of Project 250 will immensely impact the gaming landscape for decades to come. Ubiquity of availability is often critical in broad-scale consumer adoption, especially in payments, and this investment will drive the whole industry towards the apex of the adoption inflection curve.”
