i2c, Bank of George Team to Launch Gaming Credit Card

Digital payment and banking technology company i2c and Bank of George are expanding the bank’s gaming payments ecosystem with a virtual and physical credit card.

“Powered by i2c’s agile payments platform, the Bank of George credit card will fill a need within an underserved, yet fast-growing, gaming and sports segment,” the company said in a news release Wednesday (Oct. 12).

The digitization of the United States gaming ecosystem is estimated to be a total addressable market (TAM) of more than $400 billion, according to the release.

The card program marks the expansion of the platform i2c launched in 2016 with its Discover prepaid card. This new program is “flexible enough to have B2B and B2C dimensions, targeting gaming and sports franchises, financial institutions, as well as the bank’s more than 700,000 existing customers,” the release stated.

Edward Nigro, executive chairman of Bank of George parent GBank Financial Holdings, added in the release that many of the bank’s customers “may be unfairly underserved when it comes to credit.”

In a conversation with PYMNTS in August, i2c General Manager of the United Kingdom and European Union Jonathan Vaux discussed how the digital shift has ushered in a new era of commercial credit.

Read more: Bank-FinTech Collaboration Shakes up Commercial Credit Landscape

Vaux described a credit sector in transition, saying application programming interfaces (APIs) have led to the use of virtual cards for a broad range of services, and embedded use cases are a big part of the value proposition.

He added that a boom in small business credit has been fueled by “a huge democratization” in acceptance in recent years via players such as Square. And it’s given issuers a clearer idea of what overall credit usage looks like — and knowledge of how to optimize for it.

“Credit card as a product” is giving way to “credit as a feature alongside virtual cards or wallets or multi-currency capabilities,” Faux told PYMNTS. “All those services have been kind of decoupled, and we are seeing some really exciting reinvention of those capabilities to offer a wide range of new services.”