How KTO's biometric Pix deposit found its place in the player's routine.
01 · Context
KTO was a licensed betting platform in Brazil, and deposits were where the revenue started. Most of that revenue came from recurring depositors, players who added money every week, not from first-time depositors. For them, depositing was a habit they barely noticed.
Almost every deposit ran on Pix, the instant payment system the Brazilian Central Bank runs and most Brazilians use every day. A Pix deposit meant copying a code, switching to the bank app, paying, and coming back. Players completed 39 million of them between January 2025 and August 2026, and the round trip still lost people: about 55% of players who copied a Pix code had no completed payment 24 hours later.
Pix Biometrics removed the round trip. It ran on Open Finance, the regulated framework that lets a bank authorize a payment inside another company's app, so a player could confirm a deposit with their face or fingerprint without leaving KTO. It worked on app and mobile web, only for players whose bank was eligible and already linked, and enrollment belonged to the channel where the player did it.
02 · The obvious choice
A faster deposit sounds like something to offer at the moment of the deposit. The Payments PM argued exactly that: if players did not adopt the feature, it lost its reason to exist, and the deposit screen was where every player would see it. She was right about adoption. What the argument left out was the cost of interrupting a payment.
03 · The A/B test
I brought her the data we already had from earlier experiments: every time we added something to the payment flow, conversion dropped. She suggested an A/B test so we would not decide on other experiments' data alone. The test was cheap to run, and I agreed.
The variant that offered enrollment during the deposit converted 31.8% worse than the control. The screen carried too much information, and players left the flow. Many of them never came back, including the ones who skipped enrollment.
That was a double loss. We gained no biometric users and lost the deposit we already had. For a business that lived on recurring deposits, a feature that interrupted the deposit cost more than it could ever save.
04 · Before or after
The test exposed the real constraint. A recurring depositor opens the deposit screen with a fixed expectation: pay the way they always pay. Interrupting that breaks a contract the player never had to think about. First-time depositors gave us more room, since they had not learned our flow yet, but even they brought expectations from deposit flows in other products.
I decided to offer enrollment only before or after the routine, never during it. A banner at login announced the feature before the player started anything. A second offer came right after a standard deposit went through, when the player had just finished a routine they repeat every week.
Everything else about the deposit stayed familiar. Limits worked exactly as before (R$50,000 for regular players, R$100,000 for VIP players), with the limit shown in the value field and the continue button disabled above it.
05 · Trust
Before that decision, we had a trust problem to solve. Players hesitate to hand over their face or fingerprint when they don't know what happens to that data or how the payment works. We tested social proof and copy about data use and Open Finance security on the payment screen. Players did not read it. The screen already showed the bank, the account and the amount, and the reassurance turned into noise.
We also considered a separate step with the same explanations. I dropped it quickly: every extra step in a payment flow costs conversion, and our own tests had shown it each time we added one.
Moving enrollment out of the deposit settled the question. The deposit screen no longer had to persuade anyone, so it kept only what players saw in every deposit.
06 · Failure path
A biometric check can fail for reasons outside our product: the bank, the device, a setting. I designed the failure path around one rule: the player always finishes the deposit. The flow retried once. If the check failed again, it fell back to the standard Pix flow, and a toast at the top explained what went wrong and suggested checking the device settings.
I also proposed a help page linked from that toast, listing the failures we could not diagnose ourselves. Then I deprioritized it. It needed production time we did not have, it added complexity to the test, and the fallback already protected the deposit. It went to the V2 backlog.
07 · The rule
The decision outlived the project. Inside Payments, protecting the deposit was already an instinct, but other teams still pushed for space in the flow. Loyalty & Promotions wanted to cross-sell promotions inside the deposit, and the 31.8% ended that request before it reached design. From then on, any team that wanted a place in the deposit flow had to answer to that number, and the rule held: nothing interrupts the deposit.
08 · Results
The flow reached production on 7 May 2026. The Payments PM's rollout plan released it in four segments, starting with the players who deposit most: about 11,000 players with five or more deposits a week, then about 32,000 with three or more, about 11,000 app-only players and about 89,000 with two or more. Tech, Ops, CX and Compliance ran a readiness check before each stage.
The Payments PM reported the results. Deposit completion dropped from about two minutes to about twenty seconds, 83% faster. In an A/B test, recurring-deposit conversion rose 4.5 percentage points. The players we reached first were the ones who deposit most, which is why we measured recurring deposits and not first-time ones.
09 · What's next
Only 13.9% of the players who saw the offer enrolled, from launch until KTO closed. The flow proved itself for the players who used it, but we had not found the right way to sell it.
The offer after the deposit taught us the second half of the lesson. A player who has just deposited wants to play, not to set up a payment method. Many saw the offer and went straight to the game. The login banner, which reached players before they had a goal in motion, brought in the most enrollments.
That pointed the next step toward the moments before a deposit. I planned to test push, email and SMS announcing the feature. A personalized home would have helped most: KTO's home looked the same for every player, so we could not show the offer to specific audiences or at specific points in the journey.