It stands to reason that the easier it is to fund gambling at a casino, the more revenue the casino can generate through patron play.

That’s the basis for Koin, a Las Vegas-based digital payment company that provides digital wallets for players that can easily be funded by banks, debit or credit cards, Paypal, Venmo, Apple Pay or Google Play.

Co-founded by company President Gary Larkin and casino entrepreneur Gary Ellis, who’s best known as the top executive for Ellis Island and the Village Pub chain of taverns and cafes, Koin has proven its technology and is now positioned to expand into the industry.

Koin has been designed to enable the fastest, most secure, and most economical way for patrons to fund gameplay or make retail purchases anywhere, anytime, using mobile wallets in their iOS and Android devices. A mobile app can be downloaded for free.

In an interview at Koin’s Las Vegas headquarters, Larkin said casino companies have long recognized that they want to make it easier for patrons to fund their gambling so that they can focus on marketing slot machine, table play or sports wagering.

“The industry for a while has been looking at trying to take cash off the floor,” Larkin said. “How do we enable people to pay for their gaming activities in the same way they pay for a Starbucks coffee or their groceries or tap and pay at a Costco gas station?”

Larkin said it’s more complicated in casinos because there are regulations and legislation that prohibit directly using debit and credit cards at slot machines.

For that reason, critics of digital payment want guardrails in place to prevent compulsive gamblers from draining their bank accounts directly into machines.

“Unlike normal retail where everybody connects through Visa or MasterCard, American Express or Discover, in the case of casinos they’re all very internalized and once you’re inside a casino property you don’t interact with the outside world other than maybe through an ATM,” Larkin said. “And that’s not the most efficient way to get money to go gamble when you try to have fun.”

Before co-founding Koin 2½ years ago, Larkin was involved in other digital payment platforms worldwide, working with institutions in three continents.

“So we started looking at how to reinvent the whole infrastructure so that there would be more transportability for the consumer and a way to create a relationship once that could then take them through many different properties and not just gambling but all the restaurant activities all of the nightclub activities and then when they move outside of those resorts how might they use that payment relationship or communication relationship that they had built to do other things,” he said.

In addition to the challenge of working payment methods within gaming, Koin is confronted with integrating payment through manufacturers’ multiple operations systems.

“Yeah, it’s terribly complicated,” Larkin said. “Most of the systems that drive retail gaming, bricks-and-mortar gaming, are arcane in the extreme. They have been designed over decades to keep information internalized, to be very old-school in their architecture, in their thought processes, and how they allowed interoperability with anyone outside themselves. And working into those systems has been a learning exercise.”

Larkin admits that had he known how complicated integrating casino payments would be before he started he might have been too discouraged to even try to enter the market.

While some operators are protective about providing details in their casinos, Larkin says there’s a genuine desire to make casinos cashless and that’s what drives them to consider Koin as a vendor.

Koin operates in downtown Henderson’s Emerald Island Casino and in November announced a new partner relationship with a tribal operation, Casino Pauma in Pauma Valley, California. It also has established a relationship with Euronet, the world’s largest ATM provider with operations in 197 countries.

As a result of some of the relationships in Las Vegas, tribal casinos and Euronet, Larkin says Koin has the opportunity to expand exponentially.

“Euronet is a large global payment solution provider,” Larkin said. “They tend to be a back-office provider as we call it. They provide the core transactional platform systems that drive banks and processing centers globally. We wanted that enterprise-class technology at our core and in doing so we also found our first major investor who have done two rounds of investment in Koin and enabled us to look more globally in what we do. They’re the second largest international money room and the biggest owner-operators of ATMs on the planet and help us look to markets like Australia where we hope to launch in late 2026.

“We also expect to be moving into Canada in ‘26 and markets like Macao are on our radar, and while it’s a regulatory nightmare, we at least have the partnerships necessary to be a provider in those markets.”

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