First featured exclusively in iGaming news
At iGaming News, we have a clear and ongoing objective to profile and celebrate the women helping to shape the industry; the leaders behind some of the most recognised brands, products and initiatives in iGaming today.
Ladies Who Launch is a focused feature within this initiative, designed to shine a spotlight on women who have built, launched and scaled businesses across the industry. From founders and CEOs to senior leaders driving innovation, this series highlights the individuals behind the progress and the companies shaping the future of iGaming.
Within this feature, readers will gain insight into each contributor’s personal and professional journey, exploring how they entered the industry, the career paths they have taken and the experiences that have shaped their success. It will also provide practical advice and perspectives for other women working in, or looking to enter, the iGaming space.
Viktoriia Degtiarova, Founder of PaySecure
I entered the iGaming industry through my work at PokerStars, where over time, I became responsible for marketing and operations in Ukraine. It was a very transformational experience that shaped my understanding of both the industry and business overall.
What always inspired me about iGaming is how fast-moving, technology-driven, and innovative the industry is. You can constantly experiment, launch new ideas, and see the market’s response almost real-time. That dynamic environment and continuous evolution have always been very motivating for me.
Later, after working across growth, commercial, operations, and marketing, I realised how critical payments and fintech are within the customer journey. Very often, the payment stage defines the overall user experience, conversion, and business growth. That is what naturally drew me closer to fintech and solving complex challenges within the payments space.
At a certain point, the right timing, the right people, and a shared vision of the market came together and that is how I became part of a business focused on building payment infrastructure and orchestration solutions for the iGaming industry.
What gap in the market did you identify, and how did your business set out to address it?
The first major problem we identified was around user experience within payments. Coming from a marketing and growth background, I understood very clearly how expensive and difficult it is to acquire high-quality users and how easy it is to lose them when the payment experience is poor.
Often, operators focus too much on acquisition, but the cashier experience itself is overlooked. If the checkout is not localised for the market, not adapted to different player segments, or lacks convenience features such as preferred payment methods, suggested amounts, embedded customer support, partial deposits, it creates friction at the most critical stage of the customer journey.
This is where we started. Through our orchestration technology, smart routing, segmentation capabilities, and cashier UX, we focused on making deposits and withdrawals as seamless, fast, compliant, and intuitive as possible. The goal is simple: the payment experience should feel almost invisible to the user while supporting conversion and retention at the same time.
Today, we also see a much bigger opportunity around payment intelligence, AI, and behavioural data. Payment behaviour says a lot about player behaviour overall, but by integrating to help turn insights and automation into real-time intelligence and agentic workflows, which feed into smart routing capabilities As an orchestration and payments platform, we believe it is increasingly important not only to process transactions, but also to help operators turn payment data into actionable insights and AI is helping to make this a reality.
That includes helping operators better understand player behaviour, identify churn signals, segment users more effectively, predict VIP potential, and ultimately improve both player experience and operational decision-making. This is one of the areas we see as the future of payment infrastructure in iGaming.
What challenges or barriers have you faced in launching or scaling your business, and how did you overcome them?
One of the biggest challenges has been the complexity of operating in a truly international environment. On one side, it is incredibly valuable because you work with people from different backgrounds, experiences, and ways of thinking. But at the same time, it also comes with challenges. Different cultures often mean different communication styles, different approaches to decision-making, responsibility, leadership, and business overall. What is considered direct and efficient in one culture may be perceived very differently in another.
At the same time, the iGaming and payments industry itself is extremely fast-moving and complex. Building strong payment infrastructure is not only about technology or integrations. It requires balancing user experience, compliance, operational stability, local market knowledge, and commercial performance all at once.
Another major challenge was earning trust in the market. In iGaming, reputation and expertise matter enormously. Operators want partners who genuinely understand their business, player behaviour, local payment ecosystems, and operational realities, rather than simply selling technology. That is why we focused heavily not only on the product itself, but also on expertise, speed of execution, and solving real operational problems for clients.
What have been the key decisions, strategies, or turning points that have contributed most to your growth and success?
One of the key decisions for us was to focus not only on payments but on the entire user and operational experience around them. Very early on we realised that operators no longer simply need more PSPs connected they need flexible infrastructure, innovations that help improve conversion, operational efficiency, and allows them to adapt quickly to different markets.
Another important factor was building the product very close to the real operational challenges operators face. We continue to focus on solving pain points around approval rates, routing, cashier UX, payouts, localisation, and scaling.
A major turning point was the understanding that payment data is no longer just operational data, but a source of strategic business insights. That is why orchestration, segmentation, and payment intelligence are becoming increasingly important across the industry.
Another major contributor to growth has been the team’s ability to adapt quickly to change. Both iGaming and fintech evolve extremely fast, so for us it has always been important to stay close to the market, react quickly, and focus on solving real business problems for clients.
What would you like to see the iGaming industry doing more of to better support and promote female leadership?
I would like to see more mentorship and educational initiatives within the industry. It is incredibly valuable when women in senior and leadership positions mentor younger professionals, share their experience, and help others navigate career challenges. I believe the industry would benefit greatly from more structured mentorship and networking programs where people can either find mentors or become mentors themselves. It is valuable for both sides and can significantly support professional growth.
I would also like to see a broader perception of the roles women can play in business. Very often, women are still mainly associated with marketing or HR, while today many women successfully lead commercial, fintech, operations, product, and strategic functions. From my own experience, women often bring very strong qualities into leadership – clarity in communication, resilience, adaptability, accountability, and the ability to manage complex teams and environments very effectively.
What changes would you like to see in the iGaming industry more broadly, and what advice would you give to other women looking to launch or scale a business in this space?
The biggest change I would like to see in the iGaming industry is a stronger focus on AI, automation, and data-driven decision-making. What is happening with AI right now is both exciting and slightly intimidating at the same time. We are entering a completely new era where AI is changing how businesses operate, analyse data, build customer journeys, and scale. Agentic AI is a tool that we see as being extraordinately powerful within payments, especially within orchestration processes. My advice especially to women is to stay curious, adaptable, and constantly test new technologies and ideas. iGaming is an extremely innovative industry, and the people who grow the fastest are usually the ones who evolve with the market.
