Raymond Delacroix

About Raymond

Raymond joined 8day.gg in early 2025 to build out the payments research function, which sits between our editorial team and the compliance side of the business. His remit is straightforward: every payment method that appears on any page of the site has been tested with a real transaction, chronometered from click to arrival, and repeated across several sample sizes. When our France crypto page says USDT on Tron liquidates in 18 minutes at VipLuck, that number came from Raymond's tests, not from the operator's marketing.

Before joining our team, Raymond spent twelve years in fintech, including seven years at a large European payments processor working on card acquisition and alternative payment method integrations. That period gave him direct familiarity with why deposits fail at some banks and succeed at others, why certain card BINs decline transactions to gambling merchants, and why crypto cashiers are structurally faster than bank rails for reasons that have nothing to do with the operator being trustworthy or not.

He is based in Lyon and covers the French, Dutch, Danish, and Portuguese markets from a payments angle. He reads English and French natively, and works with Marta and our regional contributors on the German and Nordic markets when payment-specific content needs a native-language voice.

Testing approach

The payments testing protocol Raymond built for 8day.gg treats every operator as an experiment. For each casino under review, Raymond makes deposits via a minimum of two methods (typically one fiat and one crypto), records the exact time from confirmation to funds landing in the casino account, then makes a withdrawal via the fastest available method and repeats the chronometer from clicking withdraw to the funds appearing on the destination account.

Every measurement is repeated at least three times to average out network conditions and support-side delays. Withdrawals near known cut-off times (weekend hours, end of month) are timed separately from mid-week baseline measurements because the two conditions produce structurally different results. The published median withdrawal time is the median of at least three baseline transactions, not the operator's advertised time.

For cryptocurrency methods, Raymond runs additional checks that fiat methods do not require: the destination address family (native, wrapped, or bridged), the network fee actually charged versus the advertised fee, and the confirmation count required before the operator considers the transaction settled. These variables meaningfully change the practical experience of using a crypto cashier and are documented on individual review pages.

Areas of expertise

Raymond's specialisms are the plumbing of casino payments: how card acquiring works for high-risk merchants, why iDEAL and Paylib work reliably where card payments sometimes fail, when a USDT transaction is safe to consider final, and how KYC document review times correlate with operator ownership structures. He wrote the internal reference on which banks decline which merchant category codes, which is a shorter document than one might expect because the picture changes annually.

He is the fact-checker of choice on our France crypto casino coverage, our Netherlands iDEAL analysis, and our Australia cryptocurrency casino ranking, and works with Aisha on compliance-adjacent topics like PSD2 SCA exemptions and travel rule implementations.

Background

Raymond studied economics at Sciences Po and completed a specialist master's in financial regulation at ESSEC before starting his career at a Paris-based fintech consultancy in 2013. He moved to Lyon in 2018 for a role at a European card acquirer and stayed there through several restructurings before deciding in 2024 that the analytical work was more interesting than the internal politics. He joined 8day.gg six months later.

He does not accept payments from operators or payment processors for editorial coverage. Any commercial relationship affecting a page he authors or fact-checks is disclosed in the site's affiliate disclosure statement. He treats the separation of testing and revenue as non-negotiable and would rather lose a story than compromise the measurement.

Recent work

Selected pages Raymond has authored or fact-checked this quarter.

Contact

Raymond is reachable via the contact form for payment-specific tips, disputes, or corrections. If you have direct evidence that a published deposit or withdrawal timing figure is inaccurate, he will personally re-run the measurement and update the affected page. Corrections receive a dated note in the changelog visible at the bottom of each updated page.