Thanks for your hard work in getting this setup. Is there any criteria on when we would be required to provide personal information such as SSN? Is that only for leagues that pay out prize money?
It’s for everyone for now for the first time. I’m working with Paydala directly to understand their compliance requirements, especially as they apply to international customers, and should have an update about this soon.
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Thanks Niv. It just feels a bit awkward to have to provide SSN for non prize leagues. I understand why it would be required for leagues that pay out, however. Part of it is also that I’m not familiar with Paydala, so I’m a bit hesitant to trust them with my SSN. That may be more of a me problem, though.
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Unfortunately compliance with the various state regulations around season-long fantasy sports, since they’ve been grouped with DFS and sports betting (don’t get me started) requires a broader brush in order to make sure no one is breaking any laws.
From a trust perspective, I get it, but also Paydala has proven a trustworthy partner so far during a pretty difficult period, so I will vouch for them.
Hey Niv,
I have already received some push back from members of my league regarding giving their SSN to an unknown site. I myself am not very comfortable with it to be quite honest.
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I’m breaking this out into its own thread, separate from the technical demo of Paydala. Will get into more details on this tomorrow.
Niv,
Could you request a copy of the company’s SOC report over security controls? This is something any reputable company should be able to provide.
To everyone who in 2023 is feeling a little wary of giving information to any company: yeah, I hear you.
The underlying problem is that the only payment processors that will work with season-long fantasy sports companies in 2023 are ones that primarily work with sports betting and DFS companies. Traditional payment processors, due to a myriad of state-level and federal-level laws, will no longer host fantasy sports companies. This is what happened with PayPal - they determined we should be grouped in with sports books, and decided we weren’t worth the risk even after we appealed many times about our legality and how different our offering is than that of a DFS provider or a sports book.
Paydala is focused on compliance rather than just ignoring certain businesses. This means reassuring their backing financial institutions that they aren’t abetting money launderers or credit card fraud. This in turn means getting a bit more information from customers than just swiping a credit card, in order to perform Know Your Customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) checks.
Concerns about money-laundering or credit card fraud are legitimate concerns for sports books and casinos and even DFS sites, due to how those offerings work*. They are not reasonable concerns for Ottoneu, but, again, due to the current legal landscape across the United States, this is the class of business we are grouped with. I’ve had multiple calls with the Paydala team helping them understand our offerings and how they differ from sports books, casinos, DFS, etc. They understand these differences and are working with me to make their offering less strict on the KYC and AML fronts, for specifically Ottoneu, their first non-DFS, non-sports book client. However as they are navigating their compliance they’ve requested that if we want to go live, we have to go live with these KYC and AML checks in place.
I’ve looked at a number of payment providers. Paydala is the only one that I believe has the combination of technical understanding, responsiveness to Ottoneu’s product needs, smooth existing payment flow, and quality of the founding team that I was willing to partner with. And this is no joke - if we didn’t find the right partner, it is extremely unlikely I would have been able to continue Ottoneu past this baseball season. We have taken $0 in income since being kicked off PayPal in May and the landscape of payment processors that are willing to work with fantasy sports providers is dire right now.
So at the end of the day, I’m continuing to work with Paydala to ease the KYC and AML requirements for Ottoneu’s customers and they are working to meet our needs. My hope and belief is that this regulatory climate will change, especially in terms of separating season-long and dynasty fantasy sports from the regulations that rule DFS, sports betting, and casino operators. However, if you want to play fantasy football in 2023, it is very likely that this identifying information will be a requirement from Paydala, for at least the next couple of weeks.
Here is Paydala’s terms of service. They are a platform that does not store PII or credit card information, in order to stay compliant with the various relevant laws around privacy. They utilize Dwolla, MX, and Lexis-Nexis, all of whom have published SOC 2 audits. I requested these audits this morning from Paydala and I’ve put them in a public Dropbox folder.
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- I’m happy to discuss this further if it is of interest. I’m also happy to discuss how we got here and what can happen next, but that might be more of an in-person conversation.
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A world without Ottoneu, would be sad indeed! I’ll mail you cash if it is what it takes to process payment. 
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I appreciate the sentiment, but that would get us into more trouble than any of this
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Hey Niv,
If we choose not to continue with Ottoneu and Paydala, how can we receive prize money for current baseball leagues in which we qualify for prize money?
Receiving prizes, regardless of if you choose to continue with Ottoneu or not, will be done through Paydala. Just like PayPal, they will require some information to do a quick AML/KYC check on anyone we want to send money to over the internet, as is required by US law.
If you have any questions or concerns about this, please reach out to me directly at help@ottoneu.com
I was curious, so I read through their senior executive bios on their website. Paydala’s CEO (Inder Singh) is a former COO of Lifelock. For those unfamiliar, Lifelock is a very well established company that protects consumers against identity theft. Prior to that, he held a number of senior-level positions at Bank of America.
I also glanced through those audits and everything appears to be in order. While they’re a relatively new company, I’m 100% confident that they’re legit.
So FWIW, I’m planning on reupping for football and providing them my SSN. My initial reaction to sharing SSN was “hell no” but after doing a little bit of investigating I’m more comfortable with it. Wish it weren’t necessary, but our banking laws are more than a little insane.
Thanks for getting this all setup so that Ottoneu can continue, Niv!
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Thanks for this note, @walt526. I appreciate the understanding and the support.
This is basically it. Not my choice, not Paydala’s choice, but it is the choice of various federal and state-level lawmakers. And frankly, Paydala seems better to me in a number of ways than PayPal, a notoriously bad company both in terms of compliance and in terms of user privacy.
For anyone who cares, Inder and his lead developer have been making time to talk to me as they build new features into their platform for Ottoneu. A far cry from the lack of support we received from PayPal.
If anyone has any further questions about this, please email me at help@ottoneu.com.
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What about us Canadians? Will there be any issues there?
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Please check this post and thread:
I’m going to go ahead and lock this thread and request any further questions regarding this are sent to help@ottoneu.com
Thanks everyone.