iGaming Glossary for Operators: Key Terms by Decision Stage

A 35% revenue share on GGR and a 35% revenue share on NGR are two different cheques, and on a EUR 500,000 month the gap is about EUR 37,000. That's the kind of detail this glossary companion exists for. Rather than listing definitions A to Z, it walks the terms in the order an operator meets them: picking a model, getting licensed, signing a platform, wiring payments, passing compliance, buying traffic and finally reading the numbers in a board pack.

Last reviewed: September 2026

The definitions themselves live in the iGamingHub glossary, which holds 62 terms across six hubs (business, compliance, marketing, mechanics, payments, technology). This page explains how the terms get used in a deal, a licence application or a monthly report, and links each one to its glossary entry. Where a term is best understood through a real platform card, the example comes from the 44 platforms iGamingHub tracks as of September 2026.

Contents

1. Choosing an operating model
2. Licensing and jurisdictions
3. Platform and content
4. Payments and cash flow
5. Compliance and responsible gambling
6. Marketing and affiliates
7. Finance and reporting
8. Summary matrix by stage
9. How the terms connect

Choosing an operating model

The first vocabulary you need is the one that describes what you're actually buying. A white-label casino runs under the vendor's licence and brand infrastructure; you own the marketing and the player relationship, the vendor owns almost everything else, and you pay a fixed monthly fee or a share of revenue for the privilege. A turnkey casino gives you the same stack but under your own licence, so the compliance exposure and the upside both sit with you. The third option is to assemble the pieces yourself: a PAM for players and wallets, a game aggregator for content, and separate contracts for payments, KYC and a sportsbook feed. Vendors call that "modular" or "API-first", and it's the route for operators who already run a tech team.

The commercial terms attached to each model are where the glossary earns its keep. "Revshare" in a platform contract means the vendor takes a percentage of your gaming revenue every month, typically 10 to 20% for a turnkey deal and higher for white-label. "Fixed" means a licence fee plus a monthly platform fee regardless of volume. "Hybrid" is a lower fixed fee plus a smaller percentage. Which one wins depends on where you expect to be in 18 months: revshare is cheap at EUR 50,000 GGR a month and expensive at EUR 2 million. The catalog cards make this concrete. iGamingHub tracks SoftGamings as a white-label vendor on a fixed model with a 1 to 8 week launch window, Softswiss as a turnkey platform on a hybrid model with a 4 to 12 week window, and EveryMatrix as turnkey on revshare with a 6 to 15 week window. Same product category, three different ways to pay for it.

Two more terms belong at this stage. Platform migration is what happens when a white-label brand outgrows its vendor and has to move players, balances and bonus histories to a new PAM, and it's the hidden cost of the cheap entry route. A sweepstakes casino is the US-specific model that runs on virtual currency plus a promotional redeemable coin instead of a gambling licence, and the vocabulary around it (Gold Coins, Sweeps Coins, AMOE) is a separate dialect worth learning before you look at that market.

Read more: White-label vs turnkey: real costs and how to choose a platform provider.

Licensing and jurisdictions

Licensing has its own set of pairs. A B2C licence lets you take bets from players; a supplier licence (B2B licence) is what your platform and game studios need in regulated markets that license the supply chain, and since 2024 a growing list of jurisdictions asks for both. When a market has no local licence at all, or has one that the big brands ignore, the industry calls it a grey market. The term isn't a legal category; it's a risk label, and it shows up in platform contracts as a list of countries the vendor will or won't serve.

Channelisation is the regulator's word for the share of gambling spend that flows through licensed operators rather than offshore sites. It matters to you because a regulator that's losing channelisation tends to tighten bonus rules and raise tax, and one that's winning it tends to leave the market alone. Sweden set a 90% target at its 2019 re-regulation and has sat several points below it since, which is the background to every Swedish policy debate. Geofencing is the technical side of the same idea: blocking or allowing play by location so that a licence for one market doesn't accidentally serve another.

The tax vocabulary is the one that hurts if you get it wrong. Most regulated markets tax gross gaming revenue: Brazil at 12% of GGR under the 2025 framework, the Netherlands at 37.8% from January 2026, Malta at 5% on revenue generated from Maltese players. Germany is the exception that gives the turnover tax its name: 5.3% of every stake on online slots, regardless of whether the game paid out. At a 96% RTP, a 5.3% turnover tax is roughly equal to a 130% GGR tax, which is why the German slot market looks the way it does. The UK Gambling Commission uses "gross gambling yield" (GGY) for what everyone else calls GGR; the Commission's industry statistics are published in that language and it's the term you'll meet in any UK licence application.

Two technical terms sit inside the licence file. Game certification is the test-lab report (GLI, BMM, iTech Labs and a few others) confirming a game's maths and RNG meet the jurisdiction's rules; each regulated market wants its own certificate, and a game that's certified for Malta isn't automatically certified for Ontario. The Malta Gaming Authority publishes its technical standards openly, which makes it a useful reference even for operators licensing elsewhere.

Read more: how to open an online casino in 2026.

Platform and content

Once the model and the licence are settled, the conversation moves to what's under the hood. The PAM holds the player record, the wallet, the bonus engine and the compliance log; it's the system of record, and every other component reports into it. Content arrives through a game aggregator, which bundles hundreds of studios behind one integration, or through direct integrations with studios who run their own remote game server. The RGS is the studio's box that runs the game logic; your platform launches the game, the RGS plays it, and the bet and win calls come back to your wallet.

The maths vocabulary matters because it drives your margin. RTP is the theoretical return to the player over a long sample; the house edge is the complement, so a 96% slot has a 4% edge. Studios ship several certified RTP variants of the same title (96.5%, 94%, 92% are common) and your platform picks which one each market gets, so "what RTP are we running" is a commercial decision, not a fact of nature. Game weighting is the bonus-side version: the percentage of a bet on a given game that counts toward a wagering requirement. Slots at 100%, table games at 10% or zero, is the standard pattern, and it's there to stop players clearing bonuses on low-edge games.

Content categories get their own terms. Live dealer is streamed table play with a human dealer, and its economics (studio fees, dedicated tables, minimum guarantees) are different from slots. Crash games are the fast multiplier format that came out of crypto casinos and now sits in most lobbies. A progressive jackpot pools a slice of every bet into a growing prize, and the contract question is who funds the seed and who carries the liability if it hits in week one. A must-drop jackpot is the smaller cousin that guarantees a payout by a set time or amount.

Sportsbook adds a second dictionary. Overround is the bookmaker's margin built into the odds: a market whose implied probabilities add up to 105% has a 5% overround. In-play betting is wagering after the event starts, and it's where most sportsbook revenue and most trading risk live. A bet builder lets the player combine selections from one event into a single bet, and cash out lets them settle early at the current price. In a platform card, "sportsbook: yes" can mean a full trading team or a white-labelled odds feed, so ask which.

Performance terms round out the stage. Time to interactive is the point at which the lobby responds to a tap, and on a mid-range Android phone on a mobile connection it's the number that decides whether a first-time visitor stays. A PWA is a web app that installs like a native app without going through an app store, which is why so many casinos in app-store-hostile markets ship one. On the catalog side, iGamingHub tracks Softswiss at 40,000 slots and a 99.999% uptime SLA on its card, and EveryMatrix at 4,000 slots and 99.95%; the slot count tells you how many studios the aggregation layer has under contract, the SLA tells you what the contract promises when it goes down.

Payments and cash flow

Payments have the densest jargon of any stage, and the terms translate directly into cash. Acceptance rate is the share of attempted deposits that succeed; in high-risk card processing it can sit anywhere from 60% to 90%, and every point is players who tried to pay you and couldn't. The merchant discount rate (MDR) is the processor's fee per transaction, and for gambling card volume it runs 3.5 to 8% against 1 to 2% for a regular online shop. A chargeback is a player disputing a deposit through their bank. Card schemes police the ratio: Visa's monitoring programme flags merchants at 0.9% of transactions and 100 disputes a month, and sustained breaches end in fines and eventually a terminated merchant account. Keep the number under 1% and you'll rarely hear about it.

Rolling reserve is the processor holding back 5 to 15% of your volume for 90 to 180 days as a cushion against those chargebacks. It's not a fee, the money comes back, but a new operator processing EUR 300,000 a month at 10% for six months has EUR 180,000 sitting outside the business, and that has to be in the launch budget. A merchant of record is the entity that legally takes the payment; in a white-label deal that's usually the vendor, which is convenient at launch and a real constraint the day you want to leave.

The infrastructure terms describe how to stop depending on any one rail. Payment orchestration is a routing layer that sends each transaction to the best of several processors and retries failures elsewhere; it's the tool that moves acceptance from 70% toward 85%. Open banking and account-to-account payments skip cards entirely and move money bank to bank, with no chargeback mechanism and lower fees, which is why UK and Nordic operators push them so hard. Strong customer authentication is the European two-factor rule on card payments that trades a little friction at deposit for a lot less fraud. Mobile money (M-Pesa, MTN MoMo, Airtel Money) is the dominant rail across much of Africa and is a wallet, not a bank, with its own settlement rhythm.

A platform card compresses all of this into one number. iGamingHub tracks EveryMatrix at 180 payment methods and Softswiss at 200; the figure is a count of integrations, not a promise that the one you need is licensed for your market, so treat it as a starting list and confirm the three or four rails that will carry 80% of your deposits.

Compliance and responsible gambling

The compliance vocabulary shows up first in the licence application and then every day in operations. KYC is identity verification: who the player is, how old they are, where they live. AML is the wider duty to detect and report money laundering, and the two get confused in contracts because the same vendor often sells both. Enhanced due diligence is the deeper check triggered by risk: a politically exposed person, a high-value account, a deposit pattern that doesn't match the declared occupation. In the EU, the anti-money-laundering directives set a EUR 2,000 threshold at which gambling operators must apply customer due diligence on winnings or stakes, and most licensed operators run full KYC well before that point.

Fraud terms describe the ways players attack you. Multi-accounting is one person running several accounts to claim multiple welcome bonuses or dodge limits; bonus abuse is the broader category of exploiting promotions, and device fingerprinting is the main defence, linking accounts through browser and hardware signals rather than the details the player typed in. In a board pack these three appear as one line, "bonus cost", and the difference between a 15% and a 30% bonus-to-GGR ratio often comes down to how well they're managed.

Responsible gambling is the umbrella term for the tools that let players control their play and the duties that make operators watch for harm. Deposit limits, session reminders, reality checks and cooling-off periods are the standard kit. Self-exclusion is the strongest tool: the player bars themselves for a set period or permanently, and in regulated markets there's usually a national register (GAMSTOP in the UK, Spelpaus in Sweden, OASIS in Germany) that every licensee must check against. The newer term is affordability, or financial vulnerability checks: since February 2025, UK operators run light-touch checks at GBP 150 of net deposits a month, and the industry expects that pattern to spread. The UK Gambling Commission publishes the rules in its licence conditions, and it's the reference other regulators tend to copy.

Read more: responsible gambling tools in 2026.

Marketing and affiliates

The acquisition dictionary is short but the numbers behind it decide whether the business works. A first-time depositor (FTD) is the conversion event everyone pays on: a registered player who makes a real-money deposit. CPA is the flat fee per FTD paid to an affiliate, typically EUR 80 to 400 depending on the market, and it puts all the player-quality risk on you. Revenue share is the alternative: the affiliate takes 25 to 45% of the net revenue their players generate, for as long as those players stay active. A sub-affiliate is an affiliate recruited by another affiliate, with the recruiter taking a slice of the sub's earnings, and a large affiliate programme is a tree of these arrangements.

The deal terms deserve a careful read. Revenue share is nearly always on NGR, not GGR, and the contract definition of NGR is negotiable: it may deduct bonuses only, or bonuses plus payment fees plus gaming tax plus platform fees, which can be the difference between a 35% share of EUR 500,000 and a 35% share of EUR 350,000. Watch for negative carryover (whether a losing month for the affiliate's players offsets the next month), for the definition of "active", and for whether the share applies to the player's lifetime or a fixed window.

The retention terms sit next to the acquisition ones. A VIP program is the structured set of perks (manager, cashback, higher limits, faster withdrawals) for the top 1 to 5% of players who often produce half the revenue. The wagering requirement is the multiple of a bonus the player must bet before withdrawing: 30x to 40x on a deposit match is common, and the lower it goes, the higher the real cost of the bonus. Max cashout caps how much a player can withdraw from a bonus-funded win, and it's the clause that generates the most complaints when it's buried. Churn rate is the share of active players who stop playing in a period, and 20 to 30% a month is normal for a casino brand; it's the number that turns a CPA into a payback period.

Read more: affiliate marketing in iGaming 2026.

Finance and reporting

By the time the numbers reach a board pack, a handful of terms carry the whole story. Gross gaming revenue (GGR) is stakes minus payouts, the top line of the business, and every platform fee, aggregator fee and gaming tax is calculated on it. Turnover (or handle) is total stakes before payouts, and the ratio between the two is the hold: a slot-led casino holds 3 to 6% of turnover, a sportsbook 5 to 10%. Net gaming revenue (NGR) is GGR less the cost of keeping players: bonuses at minimum, and by most contract definitions payment fees and gaming taxes as well. NGR is the number that affiliate revenue shares and most platform revenue shares are actually paid on, which is why the definition in each contract matters more than the percentage.

The per-player terms turn revenue into a quality measure. ARPU is revenue divided by active players for the period; falling ARPU with a rising player count usually means the acquisition channel is buying cheap traffic. Player lifetime value (LTV) is what a player is worth over their whole relationship with the brand, and the simplest version is ARPU divided by monthly churn. LTV against CPA is the one ratio an investor will ask for in the first meeting. Breakage is revenue from value that's issued but never redeemed: expired bonuses, forfeited loyalty points, free spins that were never spun. It's real money but it shouldn't be the reason the bonus programme looks profitable.

Reporting infrastructure has its own vocabulary. A data warehouse is the store that pulls PAM, payments, affiliate and CRM data into one place so that GGR by studio, NGR by affiliate and churn by cohort can be reported from the same source. A customer data platform is the operational layer that turns those records into segments the CRM can act on. In practice, the question a new operator should ask a platform vendor is which of these the platform provides natively and which it expects you to buy, because "full reporting" on a sales call often means a dashboard, not a warehouse.

Summary matrix by stage

How the terms connect

The finance terms aren't separate facts; they're one chain, and a board pack is just that chain read top to bottom. Turnover becomes GGR through the hold. GGR becomes NGR through the cost of bonuses, payments and tax. NGR divided by active players is ARPU. ARPU divided by churn is LTV. LTV against CPA tells you whether the acquisition budget is building a business or renting one.

Here's the chain with numbers. A casino brand has 5,000 active players in a month. They stake EUR 12.5 million in total, and the slot-heavy mix holds 4%, so GGR is EUR 500,000. Bonuses cost EUR 80,000 (16% of GGR, inside the normal 15 to 30% band), payment processing runs EUR 25,000, and the brand pays no gaming tax in this jurisdiction, so NGR under a bonus-plus-fees definition is EUR 395,000. Divide by 5,000 players and monthly ARPU is EUR 79. Churn for the month was 25%, which means the average player lasts four months, so LTV is roughly EUR 316. If the affiliate programme is paying EUR 250 CPA, the ratio of LTV to CPA is 1.26:1, which is far short of the 3:1 most operators aim for; the brand is either overpaying for traffic, under-monetising the players it gets, or both.

Now run the contract variant. The platform takes 35% of revenue. On GGR that's EUR 175,000 a month; on NGR it's EUR 138,250. The EUR 36,750 gap is bigger than the whole payment processing bill, and it comes from a single word in the contract. The same logic applies to the affiliate deal: 35% of NGR to an affiliate whose players produced EUR 50,000 of NGR is EUR 17,500, but if their contract's NGR definition doesn't deduct payment fees the cheque is closer to EUR 18,600. Multiply across 30 affiliates and 12 months and the definitions are worth more than the percentages.

That's the practical reason to know the vocabulary before you need it. The operators who negotiate well aren't the ones who memorised 60 definitions; they're the ones who know which three terms in a given contract move the cash, and can point to the glossary entry when the other side uses a word loosely. Start with the glossary hubs, work through the stage you're in, and keep the summary matrix above to hand for the next negotiation.