Iona Macpherson

Iona spent six years on the member-services side of a Nova Scotia credit union before she ever wrote a word for publication. Most of that time was spent on the phone with people whose e-Transfer had not arrived, which is how she learned that the delay is almost never where the customer thinks it is.

She moved into consumer-finance writing in 2022 and started covering online casino cashiers because nobody else was reading the fine print on send limits. She plays low-stakes slots on weeknights and keeps a spreadsheet of every deposit and payout she has made since 2023.

How the testing works

Every casino gets a small first deposit from a personal chequing account, not a prepaid card and not a wallet dressed up as a bank. The floor is where the friction shows, so the deposit is deliberately near the minimum.

Each site then has to pay out twice, on different days of the week, and both payouts are checked against the bank statement rather than the casino's own history page. Timings run from request submitted to funds spendable, not to the moment a casino marks a request approved.

Nothing is scored out of ten and no licence numbers are invented. Where a site is good at one thing and poor at another, both halves get written down.