By Marca Wosoba, President and COO, ZBD
Right now, much of the financial world is focused on the same big topics. Open banking, central bank digital currencies and embedded payments are dominating all conversation. While these discussions are shaping the broader financial landscape, another sector is using these innovations to build the blueprint for the future of financial infrastructure: gaming.
This isn’t new. Games have always been a proving ground for digital monetization models. What started with a few in-app purchases has grown into ecosystems with full-blown economies where billions of transactions fire off every day.
With global anti-competition laws forcing companies like Apple, Google and Steam to loosen their grip on payments, game developers and PSPs are jumping in to take control of these flows. The experiments they’re running today could easily become the standards of tomorrow.
From Toll Booths to Custom Rails
For a long time, the major app stores acted like toll roads, content to take a hefty cut of app developer profit and dictate how money could move. That system is crumbling. Developers finally have the tools, the green light and the motivation to build their own rails.
Take Epic Games for example. Its new rewards program gives developers a bigger slice of revenue and offers players perks for using Epic’s native payment option. That’s not just a tweak to the business model. It’s a way of pulling creators and players closer together, with payments sitting at the center of loyalty.
Epic isn’t alone. We’re seeing wallets built directly into platforms, currencies that live entirely inside an ecosystem, and rewards systems that make legacy processors look slow and clunky. It feels less like tinkering and more like a wholesale rebuild.
Why Gamers Point to the Future
It would be a mistake for fintech leaders to treat this as niche. Gamers are probably some of the hardest customers to satisfy. They’re always asking for speed, simplicity, and clarity. Anything less is abandoned almost instantly.
So here’s the question: if someone can buy, trade, or tip inside a game in milliseconds, why would they accept a multi-day wait for a transfer from their bank? Why would they put up with fees they can’t see?
Simply put, they won’t – not for long. What’s normal in games today will soon be expected everywhere else.
Three Strategic Lessons for Fintech
1. Speed is Non-Negotiable
In games, “real time” means real time. If a transaction lags for even a second too long, people notice. Fintechs need to aim for the same standard, whether it’s moving $50 across borders or sending a five-cent tip. That requires building systems that can settle instantly and hold up under huge volumes of transactions large and small.
2. Loyalty Should Be Built In
Game platforms are showing that rewards don’t need to sit outside the payment flow. They can be baked in. A player spends, gets something back, and feels more connected to the platform as a result. Fintechs can take the same approach. Instead of treating loyalty programs as an add-on, make them part of the transaction itself. That’s how you turn payments into long-term engagement.
3. User Experience Creates Trust
Gamers will not tolerate friction. If the process feels clunky or the costs aren’t obvious, they move on. The winners keep payments, or the mechanics of paying, almost invisible – quick, embedded, intuitive, and rewarding. For fintech, that means stripping out unnecessary steps, showing fees clearly, and making every transaction feel like a value-add instead of a chore.
Beyond Gaming
Payments are no longer just utilities sitting in the background. They’re levers of strategy. By building their own rails, platforms are starting to look a lot like financial institutions, with self-contained economies that tie users closer than ever.
This isn’t isolated inside games. The same ideas are already bleeding into media, social platforms, and will eventually spread into mainstream commerce.
Why Fintechs Should Act Now
Gaming is already a half-trillion-dollar industry, and in-game spending is still growing. But the real lesson isn’t about the size of the market. It’s about the infrastructure being tested in these ecosystems.
Games are labs for programmable money, real-time rewards, and consumer-first design. If fintechs sit back and watch, they’ll find themselves adjusting to legacy standards set elsewhere. If they experiment, partner, and adapt now, they can help shape those standards themselves instead of playing catch up later.
The payments revolution won’t begin in banks or even fintech startups. It’s already unfolding inside games. And for those building the future of financial services, that is the signal worth tracking.
