GGR or NGR
The same headline percentage means two different obligations depending on which base it is charged on. Net gaming revenue has no universal deduction list, which is why the list belongs in the contract.
The vocabulary in every platform contract
The terms an operator meets in platform contracts, provider agreements and regulator correspondence, defined without the sales language.
Half the confusion in a platform negotiation is vocabulary. Two suppliers say revenue share and mean different bases. Two contracts say wallet and describe different architectures. A regulator asks for an evidence pack and gets a folder of screenshots.
So each entry here does two things: it defines the term the way the industry uses it, and it says what to actually look for when the word appears in a contract or a demo. Where a term describes something the platform does, the entry links to the page that covers it.
Four pairs that get read as the same thing
Most of the money lost to vocabulary in a platform negotiation is lost here, on two words a reader believes are one word.
Seamless or transfer wallet
One balance a provider debits over an API, or a balance the player pushes into a provider and pulls back. The second model is where money gets stranded when a transfer fails.
White label or turnkey
Not two words for buying software. They decide whose licence the brand trades under, and therefore who carries the regulated relationship with a regulator.
RTP or house edge
Two readings of one piece of maths: the share a game is designed to pay back over a very large number of rounds, and the share the operator expects to keep. Neither describes a session.
Terms beginning with A
- Aggregator
- A supplier that holds integrations with many game studios and exposes them through one connection, so an operator reaches hundreds of studios without building and maintaining hundreds of integrations. It sits between the platform and the content.
- Anti-money laundering(AML)
- The controls a licensed operator runs to detect and prevent the movement of criminal funds: screening against sanctions and watch lists, monitoring for unusual patterns, and reporting suspicion to the relevant authority. It continues for the life of the account.
- Audit trail
- An append only record of what happened on a platform: who did it, in what role, from where, on what device and when. Its value is not in logging but in reconstruction, which is why partial logs spread across modules rarely survive a regulatory review.
- Auto-provisioning
- Creating a working casino environment automatically from an approved application: the environment itself, the wallet, the game catalogue, the branding and the back office, with no manual build step. It compresses the setup phase of a launch from weeks to hours.
Terms beginning with B
- Back office
- The operator facing administration system of a casino: players, staff and permissions, the game catalogue, payments and the ledger, compliance and audit views, branding, domains and settings. It is where an operator actually spends its working day.
- Bonus abuse
- Extracting value from a promotion in ways the operator did not intend: multi accounting, low risk betting patterns that clear wagering cheaply, or coordinated groups working an offer. It is usually a terms and enforcement problem rather than a fraud problem.
- Bonus engine
- The system that grants, tracks and enforces player incentives: deposit matches, fixed amounts and free spins, along with the wagering requirement, expiry, game weighting and stake limits attached to each one. It decides whether a promotion is profitable or farmed.
Terms beginning with C
- Chargeback
- A card payment reversed by the issuing bank at the cardholder's request, usually after a claim of fraud or of a service not received. The operator loses the deposit, the winnings already paid from it, and a fee, and repeated cases threaten the merchant account itself.
- Crypto deposit
- A player funding an account with cryptocurrency. The payment is converted at a quoted rate and credited when the network confirms it, not when it is broadcast. The operational questions are which assets are accepted, who carries price movement, and what the licence permits.
Terms beginning with D
- Dedicated deployment
- A complete private copy of a platform, running on one operator's own infrastructure and holding only that operator's data, player accounts and branding. It is ownership rather than tenancy, and it changes who answers when a regulator asks where the data lives.
- Deposit limit
- A cap on how much a player can pay in over a day, week or month, set by the player or imposed by the operator. Increases must take effect only after a cooling off period, while decreases are expected to apply immediately.
Terms beginning with E
- Exactly-once settlement
- A guarantee that each bet and each win is recorded once, even when a game provider retries a message after a timeout or a dropped connection. Without it, an operator gets duplicate stakes, duplicate payouts and a monthly reconciliation argument.
Terms beginning with G
- Game curation
- Deciding how titles are categorised, tagged, grouped and ordered for players. Done manually it is a permanent staffing cost, because catalogues grow every week. Done automatically it becomes a default an operator overrides where it has an opinion.
- Game lobby
- The player facing catalogue of a casino: the collections, rows, filters and search that decide which of thousands of titles a player actually sees. It is the highest leverage merchandising surface an operator has, and the one most often left on defaults.
- Gaming licence
- The authorisation from a regulator that permits an operator to offer gambling to players, in defined activities and often in defined territories. It carries conditions on player protection, anti money laundering, reporting and advertising, and it can be suspended.
- Gross gaming revenue(GGR)
- Total stakes minus total winnings paid to players, before bonus costs, taxes, platform fees or content royalties. It is the headline measure of a casino's turnover and the base most platform revenue shares are calculated on.
Terms beginning with H
- Hit frequency
- How often a game returns any win at all, expressed as a share of spins. It is distinct from both return to player and volatility: a game can pay something on a third of spins and still return very little, because most of those wins are smaller than the stake.
- Hold
- The share of stakes an operator actually kept over a real period, as opposed to the theoretical share the game maths predicts. It moves with player behaviour, game mix, bonus cost and luck, and over a short window it can differ sharply from expectation.
- House edge
- The share of each stake the operator expects to keep over the long run, and the mathematical complement of return to player. A game with a return to player of ninety six per cent carries a house edge of four per cent.
Terms beginning with J
- Jackpot pooling
- Contributing a slice of every qualifying stake into a shared prize that grows until someone wins it. The pool can be local to one operator or network wide across many, which changes both the size the jackpot reaches and who carries the liability.
Terms beginning with K
- Know your customer(KYC)
- The regulated process of establishing that a player is who they claim to be, usually through an identity document, a liveness or biometric check and an address or age confirmation. It is a licence condition in every regulated market, not an optional friction.
Terms beginning with L
- Ledger
- The authoritative record of every movement of value on a platform: deposits, stakes, wins, bonus grants, adjustments and withdrawals, each as an entry that is never edited. Balances are derived from the entries rather than stored and updated in place.
- Live dealer
- Casino games run by a human dealer in a studio and streamed to players in real time, with bets placed through the interface. It carries higher operating costs than slots, and different latency, bandwidth and localisation requirements.
- Locked balance
- Funds a player holds but cannot yet withdraw, usually because they came from a bonus with a wagering requirement still outstanding. Keeping it distinct from real balance is what makes both the player's view and the operator's liability position honest.
Terms beginning with M
- Multi-tenancy
- An architecture in which several customers share one running system, separated by software rather than by infrastructure. It keeps vendor costs low and makes upgrades uniform, at the cost of putting every customer's data inside the same boundary.
Terms beginning with N
- Net gaming revenue(NGR)
- Gross gaming revenue after deductions, typically bonus costs, gaming taxes, payment processing fees and sometimes affiliate commission. There is no universal definition, which is exactly why the deduction list belongs in the contract rather than in an email.
Terms beginning with P
- Payment orchestration
- The layer that decides which provider handles a given transaction, retries a failure through another route, and presents one consistent result to the platform. It is what keeps acceptance rates up when a single provider degrades in one market.
- Payment service provider(PSP)
- The company that actually moves money between a player and an operator, handling card, bank or wallet rails, and charging a fee for it. An operator normally holds several, because coverage, cost and acceptance rates differ market by market.
- Player account management(PAM)
- The system of record for every player: registration, identity state, balances, bonuses, limits, session history and the account states that decide what a player may do. It is the part of a casino platform a regulator asks about first, and the part hardest to replace later.
- Player funds segregation
- Holding player balances separately from the operator's own working capital, so that player money is identifiable and protected if the business fails. Several regulators require it, and most require the arrangement to be disclosed to players.
- Politically exposed person(PEP)
- Someone holding a prominent public function, or a close associate or family member of one, who therefore carries a higher bribery and corruption risk. A PEP match does not mean refusing the customer. It means applying enhanced checks and recording why the account was accepted.
- Provably fair
- A cryptographic method, common in crypto casinos, that lets a player verify a game outcome was not altered after their bet. The operator publishes a hashed seed beforehand and reveals it afterwards, so the result can be checked independently.
Terms beginning with R
- Rake
- The operator's commission taken from a pot or a wager in games played between players rather than against the house, most commonly poker. Because the operator is not a party to the bet, rake rather than house edge is how the game earns.
- Reconciliation
- Proving that the platform ledger, the payment providers and the game providers all agree about what happened. It is a monthly obligation for any regulated operator, and the volume of manual work it takes is a direct measure of how well the systems underneath are wired.
- Regulator evidence pack
- A structured export answering a regulator's question about one player, one period or one control, assembled from the platform record rather than from memory. Its quality depends entirely on whether the underlying audit trail was complete at the time.
- Responsible gambling(RG)
- The set of duties and controls that protect players from harm: limits, self-exclusion, reality checks, affordability considerations and staff intervention. In regulated markets it is a licence condition, and failures are among the most common causes of enforcement action.
- Return to player(RTP)
- The share of total stakes a game is designed to pay back to players over a very large number of rounds, expressed as a percentage. It is a long run property of the maths, not a promise about any session, and several regulators require it to be published.
Terms beginning with S
- Sanctions screening
- Checking a player against government and international sanctions lists at onboarding and repeatedly afterwards. A confirmed match is not a risk to be priced. It is a prohibition, and continuing to serve the account exposes the operator directly.
- Seamless wallet
- A wallet model where a player has one balance held by the platform, and game providers debit and credit it in real time over an API. The player never moves money between a casino balance and a game balance, because there is only one.
- Self-exclusion
- A player's request to be blocked from gambling for a defined period or permanently. Once set it cannot be lifted early, marketing must stop, and in several markets the exclusion has to be honoured across a national scheme rather than one brand.
- Source of funds(SoF)
- Evidence of where the specific money a player is depositing came from, such as a payslip, a bank statement or a sale document. It is requested when deposit activity outgrows what is known about the player, and it is a licence condition in most regulated markets.
- Source of wealth(SoW)
- Evidence of how a player accumulated their overall wealth, rather than where one deposit came from. It is a broader and more intrusive request than source of funds, and it is usually reserved for high value players or for cases where a risk signal has been raised.
Terms beginning with T
- Tiered compliance model
- A trust ladder in which each player sits at a tier that decides what they may do: how much they can deposit, whether they can withdraw, and which checks must clear before the tier changes. It replaces case by case judgement with a rule the platform can enforce.
- Transfer wallet
- The older wallet model, in which a player moves funds from a casino balance into a game provider's own balance before playing and back again afterwards. Each transfer is a discrete event, and a failed transfer leaves money stranded between two systems.
- Turnkey
- An arrangement in which a licensed operator takes a complete platform and runs it under its own licence, keeping its own payment relationships, compliance obligations and operations. The provider supplies the technology rather than the regulated wrapper.
Terms beginning with V
- Volatility
- How a game distributes its returns. High volatility means rare, large wins and long losing runs. Low volatility means frequent, small wins. Two games with identical return to player can produce completely different player experiences and completely different balance curves.
Terms beginning with W
- Wagering requirement
- How much a player must stake before bonus funds become withdrawable, usually expressed as a multiple of the bonus, the deposit or both. Alongside it sit game weighting, a maximum bet while the bonus is active, and an expiry date.
- White label
- An arrangement in which an operator launches a brand under a provider's gaming licence, using the provider's platform, payment routes and compliance framework. The operator owns the brand and the marketing. The provider carries the regulated relationship.
- Withdrawal review
- The check a staff member performs before a payout is released, weighing the amount against the player's verification state, compliance tier, deposit history and any screening result. It is the last reversible moment in the chain, which is why it is staffed.
Terms beginning with Z
- Zero trust
- A security model in which no system is trusted because of where it sits. Every internal request authenticates, every component holds only the permissions its job needs, and being inside the network confers nothing. The point is to keep one failure from becoming a platform wide incident.
See the words on this page as screens in the product
Tiers, ledgers, evidence packs and provisioning are easier to judge in the back office than in a definition.
Thirty minutes, in the live environment, with the team who built it.
