How William Hill built a future-ready tokenisation strategy with BR-DGE
By partnering with BR-DGE, William Hill:
- Built an agnostic tokenisation strategy that reduces compliance risk and operational complexity
- Improved payment performance, cost control and flexibility by using interoperable network tokens
- Enabled a future-ready payment infrastructure with access to orchestration and connectivity capabilities to support further payments optimisation.
William Hill is a sports betting and gaming operator. Part of Evoke Plc, William Hill operates in the UK and across Europe.
The company operates in a highly regulated, multi-market environment where payments sit at the intersection of compliance, customer experience and revenue. Decisions around payments infrastructure directly affect approval rates, operational risk and the ability to scale across markets.
Like many enterprise merchants, over time, its in-house payments stack began to show limitations and PCI compliance demands became a burden.
The Challenge
William Hill faced three inter-related challenges:
- Operating in a highly regulated sector made PCI compliance increasingly complex and resource-intensive, creating operational risk.
- The existing tokenisation strategy lacked flexibility. Tokens were tied to individual providers, limiting routing and cost optimisation, slowing response to performance issues and reducing commercial leverage.
- William Hill was carrying the legacy complexity of a large operator. Years of stored card data and legacy infrastructure made change harder - any new solution would need to handle large-scale data migration securely, without disrupting customers or compromising compliance.
William Hill needed a payment tokenisation strategy that simplified compliance, removed vendor silos and gave the business the flexibility to evolve its payments ecosystem over time.
The solution
William Hill partnered with BR-DGE to replace its legacy tokenisation approach and create a more flexible, enterprise-grade payments orchestration foundation. BR-DGE’s independence and agnostic approach were critical, giving William Hill confidence that it’s payments decisions would be driven by performance, resilience and business strategy rather than vendor lock-in or processing incentives.
“ By DNA, BR-DGE has a deep understanding of the gaming industry. They understand the specific needs of gaming operators, and how it differs from how general e-commerce operates. Those deep insights and knowledge about the industry were a standout when we were going through the selection process. ”
— Martynas Sukys, Global Head of Payments, evoke | William Hill, 888, Mr Green
At the core of the solution was BR-DGE Vault, delivering PCI DSS 4.0-compliant, hybrid tokenisation and secure storage of both historic and active card data. This hybrid approached allows William Hill to continue using existing PSP tokens and, where required, PAN-based flows, alongside scheme-backed network tokens. Card details are captured once and can be used across multiple PSPs, giving William Hill full control over routing, optimisation and supplier choice.
“ You never know what partner you're going to get, but with BR-DGE, we had a relationship before going into the operational project and had built trust with each other. BR-DGE consulted with us on how to approach our migration and how best to move from the in-house solution into the BR-DGE platform. ”
Token migration was a critical part of the project. William Hill worked closely with BR-DGE to securely migrate up to ten years of card data, to ensure regulatory requirements were met, while maintaining optimal customer experience. Ongoing consultation and BR-DGE’s deep understanding of enterprise operations, ensured the project was delivered on time and with minimal disruption.
Once the core tokenisation layer was in place, William Hill began to explore BR-DGE’s broader orchestration and connectivity capabilities. This included leveraging BR-DGE’s orchestration capabilities to manage both deposits and withdrawal payment flows; to optimise routing and improve operational control across pay-ins and payouts. BR-DGE’s modular platform provides a multi-connected approach, supporting robust business redundancy and a greater ability to experiment, so William Hill can focus on being fast to market with new initiatives.
Outcomes
William Hill now operates with a future-proofed tokenisation strategy.
By partnering with BR-DGE, the business has achieved PCI DSS 4.0 compliance, whilst reducing the internal burden of managing sensitive card data. Tokenisation is handled securely, with regulatory compliance and audit requirements built in.
“ We are seeing very promising performance trends; our authorisation rates are pretty high, and we know the areas that we need to improve. The BR-DGE team has a very good Business Intelligence team that allows us to drill very deeply into what's happening. ”
The tokenisation model is fully agnostic, empowering William Hill to maintain existing PSP relationships while adopting a hybrid token strategy. Network tokens can be requested directly from the schemes, alongside additional PSP-specific tokens where required. All these options sit behind a single, portable token that works across their entire ecosystem. As a result, William Hill can route transactions dynamically across PSPs based on performance intelligence. This flexibility enables them to continually optimise, strengthen resilience and tap into the adaptable foundations, to support ongoing innovation.
William Hill now have consistently strong authorisation rates, driven by issuer trust in network tokens and better insight into transaction behaviour. Working with BR-DGE’s Business Intelligence team also enables William Hill to access a depth of payments data across the complete payments journey. It provides detail across authorisation rates, and enables them to identify issues quickly, understand where authorisations succeed or fail and optimise accordingly.
“ BR-DGE gives us the capability to experiment and allows us to go faster to market than we could in-house. Being faster to market is key to satisfying our customers’ needs, and with BR-DGE, we can deliver the best customer experience, with the best approval rates, and deliver the best business growth. ”
— Martynas Sukys, Global Head of Payments, evoke | William Hill, 888, Mr Green
For William Hill, payments are no longer a blocker to growth. Using BR-DGE, William Hill now has a future-ready foundation that supports business growth, evolving regulation requirements and emerging payment trends, whilst maintaining control and independence across its payments ecosystem.
Summary
By partnering with BR-DGE, William Hill has transformed its approach to tokenisation, moving from a specialist token provider to a payment orchestration model built for scale and control. Rather than solving tokenisation and compliance in isolation, the business now benefits from a single, interoperable payments layer that supports strategic decision-making across payment flows, providers and markets.
The implementation of an agnostic tokenisation strategy has delivered both performance and commercial benefits, improving issuer trust whilst allowing a single token to be reused across multiple PSPs, reducing duplication, lowering costs and strengthening commercial flexibility.
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