US State Register Audit: Which iGaming PSPs Hold Real Gaming Approvals

"Licensed in 48 states" is the sentence US payment providers lead with, and it is the hardest claim in iGaming to check, because there is no US register. There are dozens of them: every regulated state runs its own gaming commission, its own vendor classes, its own paperwork, and most publish nothing at all. So the phrase does an enormous amount of unexamined work in operator diligence. A vendor approval in West Virginia is a real license with a file number, while the same words in New Jersey can mean a one-page form on file. The money-transmitter half of the claim belongs to a different regulator entirely and sits in NMLS, which can be searched company by company but publishes no machine-readable register.

Where a state does publish, its register is the record, as it is for EU crypto authorizations under MiCA, UK authorizations on the FCA register and Brazilian payment institutions at the central bank. Six states publish verifiable licensee data: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan, West Virginia, Colorado and Indiana. Across them, nine of the thirteen US-facing payment brands in this audit hold gaming approvals. One brand publicly names four licensed states and appears in none of the three of those states that publish a list. Paysafe and PXP Financial appear in all six, and Aeropay holds approvals in five states, every one dating from 2025.

Four different things get called "licensed in the US"

A supplier license is the heaviest class, and West Virginia is the only one of the six states that issues true licenses to payment firms: numbered sports wagering and iGaming supplier licenses (SWS and IGS series) that move from interim to annual status with expiry dates. When a PSP says "licensed" and means West Virginia, the word is doing honest work.

A registration is the workhorse class everywhere else. Pennsylvania's gaming service provider scheme has a Certified tier and a Registered tier. Every audited payment brand with a Pennsylvania row sits in Registered, and not one is Certified. Colorado licenses payment firms as Vendor Minor, never Vendor Major. Michigan takes vendor registrations from payment firms and reserves its supplier licenses for game and platform providers. Indiana ran a Registrant class for payment vendors and then abolished enforcement of it on July 1, 2025, which means the published Indiana list is now historical evidence rather than a living register.

A form on file is New Jersey. The DGE's vendor registration (VRF) puts an entity in the state's daily Active Vendors Report, and that is what every payment brand in this audit has there: not one holds a casino service industry enterprise license. "Licensed in New Jersey" is, for a payment company, a filing.

A money-transmitter license is not a gaming approval at all: it comes from state financial regulators, governs holding and moving consumer funds, and lives in NMLS, which offers no public data feed. Some of the heaviest claims in US gaming payments ("40+ states", "48+ states") sit in this layer, which can be checked only one company at a time. And beneath all four classes sits the no-license architecture: bank-sponsor models like Aeropay's, where sponsor banks carry the regulatory load, or Adyen's federal branch, which answers to the Fed and OCC rather than any state gaming commission.

The register: entity by entity

Registers are brand-blind here the way they are everywhere else. They know Nuvei US, LLC by the trade name "Mazooma," they know Trustly as OBeP Payments, and they have never heard of half the logos on pitch decks.

Trust Payments' missing US state gaming licenses

Trust Payments is this audit's Paramount Commerce. The London PSP publicly names US state gaming vendor licenses in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Nevada, and markets six states in some materials. Nevada publishes no checkable list. The other three do, and no Trust Payments entity appears in the NJ Active Vendors Report of July 14, on any Pennsylvania gaming service provider list of the same date or in the Colorado lookup on July 15. The company is also absent from Michigan, West Virginia and Indiana, three states it does not name, and has no US entity under any related name on any of the six registers.

There is a plausible ordinary explanation: Trust Payments has documented US-side layoffs as its US product sales declined, and licenses lapse when businesses retrench. The seven years its US gaming team spent supporting casino and sportsbook operators are real history. But a claim in present tense that no present register supports is the single most useful thing a due-diligence check can surface. An operator being pitched a US launch on this stack should ask for the license schedule in writing, with state file numbers, and check two of them.

US gaming approvals for Aeropay, Paysafe, Trustly, PXP and Pavilion

Aero Payments, Inc., the entity behind Aeropay, holds a Pennsylvania registration running to December 2029, New Jersey and Michigan vendor registrations, a West Virginia interim supplier license granted in December 2025, and a Colorado Vendor Minor, a complete 2025-vintage set assembled in about a year. The bank-sponsor model still means no money-transmitter licenses, but the gaming layer exists now.

Paysafe has a three-entity American footprint (Paysafe Merchant Services, Paysafecard.com USA, Skrill USA) across all six checkable states, including West Virginia supplier licenses for each entity. Trustly holds approvals in four of those six states, including WV IGS 001, the first iGaming supplier license West Virginia ever issued, held by an entity Michigan registers as OBeP Payments, LLC DBA PayWithMyBank. That naming chain matters: audit Trustly by its brand and you will conclude it has no Michigan presence; audit by entity and the row is right there.

PXP Financial, Inc. appears in all six checkable registers, a clean sweep matched only by Nuvei, PayNearMe, Paysafe and Worldpay. Two West Virginia supplier licenses are active right now, IGS 013 for iGaming through August 2026 and SWS 035 for sports wagering through December 2026, the Pennsylvania GSP registration cleared its renewal in June 2026 and runs to 2031, and the New Jersey, Michigan and Colorado approvals are all current. PXP holds no state money-transmitter licenses, but its state gaming layer is one of the strongest among the providers rated here.

Pavilion Payments produced the audit's oddest single cell. The VIP Preferred network is the default ACH rail of US gaming, and Pavilion appears in the Pennsylvania, Michigan, West Virginia, Colorado and Indiana registers, with the Michigan registration still carrying its Global Payments ancestry. But no Pavilion, Global Payments, VIP Preferred or CPay entity is registered as a vendor with New Jersey's DGE, and the two "Pavilion" vendors on file there are unrelated namesakes from Michigan and Florida.

Nuvei's frozen 48

The most-quoted licensing figure in the vertical, Nuvei's "licensed or authorized in 48 states plus DC and Puerto Rico," has a tombstone attached: it comes from the company's 2023 annual filing, and there will not be a newer one, because Nuvei went private in the Advent deal and filed its delisting notice with the SEC in November 2024. A figure that once refreshed annually under securities law is now frozen in time, quoted forward by everyone as if it were current.

What the registers still support is the gaming side: Nuvei Technologies, Inc. is confirmed in all six checkable states, with West Virginia supplier licenses and an approved Colorado Vendor Minor. The registers also show the seams: the legacy Nuvei US, LLC (which New Jersey still lists under its trade name "Mazooma," and Indiana as "New Mazooma US") has surrendered its Colorado license, and the parent's Pennsylvania registration sits in renewal. None of that is disqualifying; all of it is the difference between a licensing story a regulator would recognize and one recited from a three-year-old filing.

How to run this check yourself

Six registers are checkable, and they are not equally easy. Pennsylvania is best-in-class: date-stamped PDF lists of every gaming service provider tier, refreshed continuously. New Jersey publishes a daily Active Vendors Report as a spreadsheet, 21,000 rows, with a key file that decodes the license classes. Ignore the frozen 2020 "Internet Gaming Ancillary" PDF that outranks it in search. West Virginia posts dated license lists with file numbers. Colorado runs a searchable verification lookup that accepts wildcards. Indiana still publishes its registrant list, which is now historical evidence of a class the state stopped enforcing in 2025. Michigan publishes the right workbook and then geo-blocks most attempts to fetch it, which makes an archived copy of the official file the practical route. Ohio and New York, for payment vendors, are effectively unauditable from outside. Money-transmitter licenses can be searched company by company in NMLS Consumer Access, a free public search that allows no bulk copying. Search by entity, never by brand, and expect namesakes, such as a Paramount that is the media conglomerate and a Sightline that sells out-of-home advertising.

This is the fourth register in the series, after ESMA for EU crypto, the FCA for the UK and the BCB for Brazil, with Peru's MINCETUR added since, and the US adds its own lesson to the pattern: where the register is fragmented, the marketing gets bolder, because nobody expects you to check six regulators. Most approvals are real. The one missing set is load-bearing. Entity by entity beats logo by logo, in any jurisdiction, and especially in the one that is really dozens of jurisdictions wearing a flag.