Laurence Booth on payments in premium hospitality and gaming

Trust Payments was selected by Les Ambassadeurs, the Mayfair private members' club and casino, to modernise its payment infrastructure, with five point-of-sale terminals installed across its gaming and dining spaces in 72 hours. The deployment is a small one. What it illustrates is what premium hospitality and gaming ask of a payment stack that ordinary retail does not.

Laurence Booth is group chief executive of Trust Payments, having previously been the company's chief information officer and chief data officer, after 16 years at American Express. In written answers to Disrupts, he explained what made the timeline possible, what normally slows a rollout, how a single venue reconciles casino and restaurant payments, and what operators are not yet planning for.

The 72 hours, Booth said, came down to "clear expectations, close collaboration and preparation". Les Ambassadeurs set a defined timeframe from the outset, and working closely with its chief financial officer, Robert Cairns, and his team allowed priorities to be aligned and decisions taken quickly. Cairns said at the time that the terminals had integrated into the operation without fanfare, which, Booth noted, "was exactly the point".

Acting as both payment gateway and acquirer helped too, with fewer third parties and fewer hand-offs between providers. The hardware, he said, is rarely the slow part. "With the right preparation, terminal installation can be completed within hours. What tends to extend a rollout is everything around it, including contracts, administration, catalogue configuration, processor approvals and integration with existing systems."

Not a one-size-fits-all stack

Premium hospitality and gaming mean "you cannot treat the payment stack as a one-size-fits-all proposition". The experience has to combine speed and convenience with "security, resilience and the controls required by a highly regulated environment", and a member making a high-value transaction expects it to feel seamless while risk controls, monitoring and operational requirements run behind it. "The challenge is managing that complexity without allowing it to create unnecessary friction for the customer." No two venues operate the same way, he added, so understanding the merchant comes before deciding what the technology looks like.

Gaming also shows payments data taking on wider responsibilities. Booth cited the company's Probability of Harm tool, which uses an algorithm to identify patterns that could indicate a greater likelihood of gambling-related harm, letting operators spot potentially at-risk behaviour earlier and segment players by risk. "I think that is a good example of how the payment layer is evolving beyond simply processing a transaction."

On the share of card transactions that are still not contactless, Booth sees circumstance rather than resistance. Physical card contactless in the UK is generally subject to a £100 single-transaction limit, and customers are periodically asked to insert a card and enter a PIN, so higher-value purchases will naturally account for some of the gap. Digital wallets can go above the limit through device authentication, "but they introduce different dependencies. A phone with no battery, a device issue or a problem with NFC can all change how somebody chooses to pay." Cash remains part of the picture: he cited LINK research finding 76 per cent of consumers believe the option to pay with cash is important, and 65 per cent believe it protects them from fraud. "The future is less about one payment method replacing every other and more about choice."

One view of a venue

Reconciling payments across gaming and hospitality inside a single venue is a recognised problem. A diner settling a restaurant bill, a member placing a bet in the casino and a member running a bar tab across an evening "may all trigger very different processing paths, even though the venue itself is a single, unified brand to the customer". If those sit across disconnected systems or providers, teams spend significant time trying to assemble a complete picture.

Trust Payments' answer is to route them through the same gateway and acquiring layer. "Transactions across the venue settle into one consolidated view instead of separate provider records that must be matched manually." The objective, Booth said, "is ultimately quite simple: the complexity should sit behind the payment experience and not with the customer or the teams running the venue".

On anti-money-laundering and source-of-funds obligations, he was careful about where responsibility sits. "The payment layer should not be viewed as a replacement for a gaming operator's AML, KYC or source-of-funds responsibilities." Where payments help is through the quality and immediacy of their data, providing signals around behaviour, payment patterns and anomalies that operators can investigate. As technology integrates, "there is greater potential for payment data to inform risk decisions in real time rather than simply becoming something that is reviewed retrospectively", while providers stay clear "about where our responsibility ends and the operator's regulatory obligations begin".

The company's Visa and Mastercard principal memberships and an acquiring network of more than 50 banks, he said, give merchants flexibility as they grow into new markets, with Trust Payments holding its own licences in the UK and Europe and working with acquiring partners in markets including Australia and North America. The relationships also bring specialist services, such as chargeback capabilities supporting Visa Verifi and Mastercard Ethoca, which flag eligible disputes before they become formal chargebacks.

What mattered more than it looked

Asked which change of the past quarter century mattered more than it appeared at the time, Booth pointed to data. "For a long time, the measure of a payment system was relatively straightforward: did the transaction go through? That remains fundamental, but the information surrounding a transaction has become almost as valuable as the ability to process it." Payments now tell businesses where friction occurs, where revenue is lost and where risk is emerging, and AI accelerates that again, moving "from systems that tell a merchant what happened towards technology that can help explain why it happened and what they might do next".

For the next 12 to 18 months, he expects the biggest change to be the speed at which AI moves from supporting payments operations to shaping decisions within them, interacting with payments data, fraud prevention, customer behaviour and operational systems in real time. That raises an infrastructure question. "AI is only as useful as the data and systems it can access. Businesses with fragmented payment environments or disconnected data may find it much harder to take advantage of these capabilities." Operators, he said, need to make sure "their payments infrastructure, data and governance are ready for what those tools can do".

UK Finance put contactless at 75 per cent of debit and 66 per cent of credit card transactions in March 2026.