Maybe they can just pay out everybody with those huge, cardboard checks?
It's about to get a whole lot harder for daily fantasy sports users to get paid from DraftKings and FanDuel after a company that facilitates the processing of payments has notified the sites it will no longer conduct business with the DFS industry.
The New York Times is reporting that Vantiv Entertainment Solutions, a company who has partnered with industry leaders DraftKings and FanDuel, informed the sites "that it 'will suspend all processing for payment transactions' related to daily fantasy sports in the United States and its territories on Feb. 29."
How this will effect daily fantasy sports users in the short term remains unclear, but the Times contends that the long term consequences could be devastating.
It is not known what percentage of total payments Vantiv handles in the industry. But if another financial processing company does not step in to handle the tens of millions of dollars in transactions, or if major banks and credit card companies follow Vantiv’s lead, it could have crippling consequences for a $2 billion industry under siege by state attorneys general across the nation.
This is just the latest setback for the controversial daily fantasy sports industry that's expected to fight for its life in 2016. New York is among the states leading to have the kinds of games DraftKings and FanDule provide deemed illegal and classified as gambling—the site's prefer to think of their contests as games of skill—and formally shut down. Texas, Illinois, and most recently Hawaii have joined the fight to have their states officially classify DFS as gambling. Daily fantasy sports is already illegal in Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada, and Washington.
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