What Gaming and Prediction Markets Teach Us About Real‑Time Money Movement

The biggest moments in gaming rarely happen on the screen; they happen in the split second a user decides to act. And when that moment hits, expectations compress to zero. Users don’t wait, and they won’t come back if they have to.  

With big sporting events kicking off, platforms are about to feel the full weight of that reality. Millions of users will fund wallets, place predictions, and cash out winnings at the exact same time. They expect their money to move as fast as the game itself. Deposits must be instant, payouts even faster, and payment flows invisible to the experience. Anything less creates friction, and friction causes churn. Almost every instance of churn traces back to a single root cause—a payments flow that can’t keep up with user behavior.

This shift in user expectation has reshaped the gaming and prediction‑markets ecosystem over the past year.  The platforms that win are the ones that essentially eliminate the gap between user intent and user action. We’re seeing the same pattern across our advanced partners: they’re not “adding payments,” they’re redesigning their products around real‑time money movement.

Aeropay is using real‑time payments to keep money moving at the exact pace of user intent, turning funding and payouts into continuous engagement loops rather than points of friction. In addition to leveraging instant payouts on rails like RTP, they were one of the first fintechs to adopt instant pay-ins with RfP (request for payment) to more efficiently fuel instant money movement.  

We worked with Sightline to prove that authorization logic can become a competitive differentiator, not a back‑office process. With Advanced Authorization, our partner can become part of the authorization flow. Authorization decisions follow real-time logic, reducing false declines and giving players a seamless connection between their gaming accounts and the physical or digital cards they use every day.

These innovations come alive during peak moments when transaction volumes surge and  global engagement runs around the clock. The urgency is growing: prediction markets are on track to reach nearly $1 trillion in annual trading volume by the end of this decade, with sports alone expected to drive 44% of it.

Every fast‑moving consumer transaction platform eventually becomes a payments company. Speed once was nice-to-have; today, it’s expected. Speed will always win on the field, on the ice, and behind the scenes, where real-time payments make the entire experience possible.