> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.igamingnews.biz/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Open Banking Is Displacing Cards at the iGaming Cashier - URL: https://www.igamingnews.biz/open-banking-payments-igaming/ - Published: 2026-07-01T12:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-11T11:38:45.000Z - Description: Open banking payments are pushing cards aside in iGaming. Trustly's push to process 100 billion dollars a year shows where operator deposits are heading. - Author: iGamingNews Editorial Desk - Tags: Technology, Affiliate Industry *Image credit: Source: company materials. Never imply stock depicts the actual event.* **Open banking payments, the account-to-account bank transfers that skip the card networks entirely, are moving from a Nordic niche to the default deposit method across regulated iGaming, and Trustly's push to process around 100 billion dollars a year is the clearest marker of the shift.** Its Pay by Bank rails connect thousands of European banks and now sit on the deposit page of most major operators, including Bet365, Flutter Entertainment, Entain and Kindred. The reason is money. Trustly reports conversion rates as high as 98% on its deposit product and a gaming fraud rate of just 0.008%, with more than 95% of payouts settling instantly. For an operator fighting rising acquisition costs and tightening margins, a method that converts more deposits, moves cash faster and loses less to fraud is a direct improvement to the bottom line, not a back-office detail. ## What open banking payments actually replace For two decades the card was the default gambling deposit. It carried interchange fees, a meaningful decline rate on gambling merchant codes, chargeback risk, and a slow, manual withdrawal process. Open banking removes the card from the loop: the player authenticates directly with their own bank, the money moves account to account, and the operator receives a confirmed, hard-to-reverse transfer in seconds. That does three things at once. It lifts conversion, because a bank-verified transfer fails far less often than a card a lender may block on a gambling code. It cuts cost, because account-to-account rails avoid card-scheme interchange. And it slashes fraud and chargeback exposure, because a completed bank transfer cannot be disputed weeks later. ## The Pay N Play model changes onboarding, not just payment The most consequential version in gambling is Pay N Play, where the bank login doubles as the account and identity check. Instead of registering, uploading documents and waiting for verification before a first deposit, the player logs in through their bank, and the bank-verified identity data completes the know-your-customer step in the same motion as the payment. That collapses the single most expensive drop-off point in the funnel, where traditional onboarding loses a large share of would-be depositors to registration friction and document delays. Pay N Play, live in markets including Sweden, Finland, Estonia, the Netherlands and the UK, turns sign-up, verification and first deposit into one flow, with Trustly citing conversion as high as 96%. A frictionless first deposit is not just a payments win but an acquisition win, and it interacts directly with the affordability regime we covered in the [UKGC deposit limit rules](https://www.igamingnews.biz/ukgc-deposit-limit-implementation-extension/). ## The compliance twist: the same rails serve the regulator Here is what makes open banking strategically different from a cheaper card. The bank connection that verifies a player's identity also exposes, with consent, the financial data regulators increasingly demand operators use. The affordability and source-of-funds checks the UK Gambling Commission and others are pushing require operators to understand a customer's financial circumstances, and open banking supplies that understanding at the moment of deposit rather than through intrusive manual document requests. That is a double-edged capability. Used well, it lets an operator run frictionless affordability checks, spot patterns that suggest harm, and meet regulatory obligations without driving customers to the black market through clumsy demands for bank statements. Used carelessly, it hands operators a richer view of customer finances than many players realise they are granting, and the consent, data-minimisation and privacy obligations around that data are serious. The operators treating open banking as a compliance tool, not just a cheaper deposit, are building the more defensible position. ## The stablecoin edge case, and where the two payment stories meet Volt, another account-to-account provider, began accepting stablecoin pay-ins at checkout in early 2026 through a partnership with BVNK, letting merchants take USDC and EURC and either settle in the stablecoin or auto-convert to fiat. That stitches the open banking rail and the crypto rail into a single checkout, and points at where cross-border deposits are heading. The tension is cost. Volt's materials imply an effective take rate well above typical open banking pricing, the trade an operator makes for reach into payment types and geographies plain bank transfers do not cover. The convergence is the story: as we argued in [stablecoins move into the mainstream of iGaming payments](https://www.igamingnews.biz/stablecoins-igaming-payments-2026/), the line between "open banking" and "crypto" deposits is blurring into a single question of which rail clears fastest and cheapest for a given player in a given market. Open banking wins the domestic, regulated, fiat case decisively. Stablecoins are pushing into the cross-border and emerging-market cases the bank rails serve poorly. ## Why this is a supplier-concentration story too Beneath the operator benefit sits a quieter risk: concentration. Trustly's scale, its coverage of thousands of banks and its presence across most major operators make it close to critical infrastructure for European iGaming payments. When one provider processes a nine-figure volume and sits on nearly every large deposit page, an outage, a pricing change or a regulatory action against it becomes a systemic issue for the operators depending on it. That is the same lesson the industry keeps relearning in data and platform supply: the cheaper, better, faster option tends to concentrate, and concentration transfers pricing power to the supplier over time. Operators adopting open banking for the near-term margin win should be building a second rail in parallel, because single-supplier dependence in a core function is a strategic exposure regardless of how good that supplier is today. ## Withdrawals are the underrated half Slow, manual payouts are one of the most common sources of player complaints and churn, and a competitive weakness against operators who pay fast. An account-to-account rail that returns funds to the same verified bank account in seconds turns a retention liability into a selling point, which is why fast payouts are increasingly marketed as a feature rather than buried in the terms. ## The emerging-market angle changes the map Open banking's dominance is clearest in mature European markets, but the same account-to-account logic is reshaping deposits in emerging regulated markets through local instant-payment schemes. Brazil's Pix system, a central-bank instant-payment rail with near-universal adoption, has become the default deposit method for the country's newly regulated betting market, precisely because card penetration is lower and bank-to-bank transfers are instant and cheap. In markets where cards were never the entrenched default, gambling is skipping the card era entirely. That is why the providers, and the local instant-payment schemes they connect to, are becoming strategic infrastructure for market entry, not just a checkout option. An operator entering a newly regulated market now has to solve local instant payments as a first-order question, because the deposit method the local player already trusts often is not a card at all. ## On course to become the default Open banking payments are on track to become the default gambling deposit in every regulated market with mature bank connectivity, pushing cards into a fallback role. The direction is set by economics operators cannot ignore: higher conversion, lower fraud, instant payouts and a compliance data feed built into the same connection. Expect Pay N Play-style onboarding to spread wherever the local banking infrastructure supports it, stablecoin and account-to-account rails to converge at the checkout for cross-border flows, and the providers behind these rails to consolidate into a small number of very large players. The card is not disappearing overnight. But the deposit page of 2026 is being reorganised around the bank connection, and the operators treating that connection as both a payments upgrade and a compliance tool are getting the full value of the shift. --- **Related on SparkNews:** [Stablecoins Move Into the Mainstream of iGaming Payments](https://www.igamingnews.biz/stablecoins-igaming-payments-2026/) | [UKGC Extends Implementation Window for New Deposit Limit Rules](https://www.igamingnews.biz/ukgc-deposit-limit-implementation-extension/)