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; the same words in New Jersey can mean a one-page form on file; and the money-transmitter half of the claim belongs to a different regulator entirely and cannot be publicly verified at all.

We checked what can be checked, register-first, the way we did for EU crypto authorizations under MiCA, UK authorizations on the FCA register and Brazilian payment institutions at the central bank. Twelve US-facing brands from our catalog went through the six state registers that publish verifiable licensee data: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan, West Virginia, Colorado and Indiana. Eight brands came out register-confirmed. One, which publicly names four licensed states, appears in none of the three we could check. And the audit corrected our own catalog in both directions, including one card that had the negative wrong.

Four different things get called "licensed in the US"

A supplier license is the heaviest class, and West Virginia is the only state in our six 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, and every payment brand we checked sits in Registered; 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, and the register is precise about that even when the marketing is not.

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 unauditable layer. 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.

The claim that failed everywhere we could look

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 all three came back empty: no Trust Payments entity in the NJ Active Vendors Report of July 14, no row on any Pennsylvania gaming service provider list of the same date, nothing in the Colorado lookup on July 15. Michigan, West Virginia and Indiana, which the company does not claim, also show nothing, and no US entity surfaced under any related name.

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, and our own card had repeated the company's framing until this audit rewrote it. 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.

Where our own catalog was wrong, in both directions

The sharpest correction was on our side of the ledger. Our Aeropay card stated flatly that no state gaming vendor licenses were found in public records, and that was true when written and wrong by July 2026: Aero Payments, Inc. now 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, and our card asserted it did not. Corrected the day the audit closed.

The undersells ran the other way, and they were not small names. Paysafe's card carried MGA, UKGC, Curacao and Alderney and said nothing about the United States, while the registers show a three-entity American footprint (Paysafe Merchant Services, Paysafecard.com USA, Skrill USA) confirmed in all six checkable states, including West Virginia supplier licenses for each entity. Trustly's card was UK and EU only, while the registers show four states, including WV IGS 001, the first iGaming supplier license West Virginia ever issued, held by an entity the Michigan register knows 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.

Pavilion Payments produced the audit's oddest single cell. The VIP Preferred network is the default ACH rail of US gaming, register-confirmed in Pennsylvania, Michigan, West Virginia, Colorado and Indiana, with the Michigan row still carrying its Global Payments ancestry. But New Jersey, the state Pavilion's own marketing lists first, shows no Pavilion, Global Payments, VIP Preferred or CPay entity in the DGE vendor report, and the two "Pavilion" rows that do exist there are unrelated namesakes from Michigan and Florida. We removed NJ from the card's license list until the register says otherwise.

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 (including, until this audit, our own industry report) 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's registrant list still stands as 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, and NMLS keeps the entire money-transmission layer that way. Search by entity, never by brand, and expect namesakes: our pulls surfaced a Paramount that turned out to be 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, 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 claims held. The one that did not was 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.