The Malta Moment That Helped Turn Trustly's Pay N Play Into iGaming’s Major Breakthrough
- Gambling IQ
- Apr 25
- 3 min read
Vasilije Lekovic joined Trustly as employee No. 40 and helped turn Pay N Play from a hard sell into one of the industry’s payments gold standards.
He joined Trustly as one of only two account managers, at a time when the company’s big idea was still being treated as a curiosity rather than a commercial weapon. But Vasilije Lekovic saw the potential early. “I always felt the product was destined for scale,” he tells GamblingIQ's annual payments magazine, Advancing the Game.
Pay N Play, Trustly’s breakthrough product, was built on a simple but disruptive promise: take the forms, the document uploads and the endless friction out of onboarding, and let the player get on with the game. The first trial came with a small operator called No Account Casino, a name that sounded half like a joke and half like prophecy. “Funny name, but it was describing how the product works,” Lekovic says. In plain English, the player deposited with Trustly and the operator created the account in the background. The result was instant play, cleaner onboarding and, eventually, a blueprint others would copy.
It was not a glamorous start. Lekovic remembers the early Malta roadshow as a kind of pilgrimage. “Basically every big operator said NO — ‘too early’, ‘regulators’, ‘compliance’,” he says. But the market has a habit of changing its mind once the numbers start doing the talking. One major launch led to another, and the idea that had been dismissed as premature began to look less like a gamble and more like common sense. “It doesn’t just improve the player experience,” Lekovic says, “it simplifies compliance and fraud prevention.”
That practical streak runs through Trustly’s culture as much as its products. Lekovic describes the early days as a crash course in start-up survival, where “you have to wear many hats in a start-up that either make or break you”. He speaks of the flat Swedish management style with obvious affection — a place where “you can actually sit and discuss things and get different opinions, even if we sometimes disagree”. It is a far cry from the grander posturing of some fintech companies. Trustly, at least in Lekovic’s telling, has always been humble - more workshop than theatre.
That workshop now looks remarkably well furnished. Trustly’s latest “Remember Me” layer has turned the company into something bigger than a payment rail. It remembers the bank account a user last used, the device they arrived on and the pattern of past behaviour. “Remember Me delivers effortless payments,” Lekovic says. “The user sees their own bank, which creates micro personalisation and faster deposits.” The idea is to make a first-time visit feel like a return trip.
The result is a business that now processes more than US$100 billion in total transaction value and counts more than 9,000 merchants globally. Recent signings including Rank Group, the Postcode Lottery and Virgin Media O2 suggest the model has travelled far beyond its gambling roots and is now being adopted by multiple industries.
Yet Lekovic still frames the mission in the same old language: solve merchant problems, reduce friction and make the cashier feel a little less like a hurdle and a little more like memory. “The main objective of Trustly, since its inception, has always been to build products that solve problems for our merchants and their customers,” he says. For a company that once had to persuade the market one operator at a time, that sounds like a pretty neat ending — or perhaps the beginning of the next one.
>> 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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