Rory Howard: From Black Friday Chaos to Paysafe Leadership
- Gambling IQ
- Apr 26
- 3 min read
After witnessing Full Tilt Poker's demise in 2011, Paysafe’s EMEA iGaming General Manager brings hard-earned fraud, payments and risk expertise to a rapidly evolving global market.
Not many younger people in iGaming will remember Black Friday, but Rory Howard does — in vivid detail. Back in April 2011, he was at his desk in Dublin when Full Tilt Poker, then one of the world’s biggest online poker sites, was shut down and “payments froze”. Howard says, “it was total chaos…”, the kind of sentence that sounds dramatic until you remember he was one of the people trying to keep a business standing while the floor was falling away beneath it. From that mess of shutdowns, emerged a new era of regulated gambling in the United States, and Howard had a front-row seat.
His route to Paysafe started in Bank of America in the UK, where he worked in fraud detection from 2007 to 2009, before heading to Dublin for Full Tilt. After that came ComeOn!, a tiny startup with just 10 people crammed into a Leicester Square office, then Gamesys in the UK and the US, and later Rank Group, where he oversaw risk, payments, fraud, due diligence and anti-money laundering across both online and retail operations. During Covid, when cash felt toxic, Howard helped roll out instant payouts using Visa Direct and 85 new machines across Mecca and Grosvenor venues in London. In the first month alone, more than GB£30m flowed back through those terminals, as operators sought safer, faster ways to pay.
By January 2024, Howard had joined Paysafe as General Manager of iGaming for EMEA, and the move made a kind of brutal sense. “One of the constants throughout that journey was always Paysafe,” he tells GamblingIQ magazine. “I knew that business very, very well from the operator side.” He also learned something he says he did not appreciate at first: “We actually hold our own card acquiring licence in Europe. Operators no longer need to juggle multiple PSPs; they can come straight to Paysafe for everything.” In a sector where operators hate complexity almost as much as they hate delays, that is a powerful pitch.
Howard is keenly aware that not every payment trend deserves a parade. On open banking — Paysafe Rapid Transfer in Europe, Pay by Bank in the US — he is refreshingly blunt. “You never know, but Betty from Bolton probably isn’t going to be using open banking,” he says. “Payments is about horses for courses, appealing to the mass market, not necessarily a niche.” It is a neat reminder that what excites tech insiders does not always win over ordinary customers. Visa and Mastercard still dominate, while open banking, for all its promise, remains a slice of the pie rather than the whole thing.
What Paysafe does have, Howard argues, is the ability to make life easier when the pressure is on. He points to the Super Bowl’s frenzy — huge transaction volumes in the half-hour before kick-off — as proof the infrastructure can cope when Europe’s World Cup moments arrive. The team is ready with Skrill, Neteller, PaysafeCard’s cash-to-online option, Rapid Transfer and local methods.
“With Paysafe, operators no longer need to juggle multiple PSPs," Rory says. “We’ve created a compelling one-stop solution and it’s working really well.” That seems to be the point of his career in a sentence: build a gateway that can take the strain, then keep it standing when the pressure arrives.
>> Read 'Advancing the Game, 2026' from GamblingIQ: https://www.gamblingiq.co.uk/magazine-advancing-the-game-gambling-annual-payments-report-2026
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