From Card Ban to Bank Tap: How Open Banking Quietly Took Over Britain's Online Casino Cashier

Britain's relationship with online payments has changed faster than most shoppers, or gamblers, have noticed. Open banking, the system that lets you move money straight from your bank account without typing in a card number, has seen the number of payments made through it soar by 53% year on year, according to the Financial Conduct Authority, with more than 16 million people and businesses now using the service.

Nowhere has that shift landed more quietly, or more completely, than in the online casino sector.

Since the UK Gambling Commission banned credit cards for gambling in 2020, operators have had to find faster, safer ways for players to move money in and out of their accounts. Debit cards filled some of the gap. E-wallets filled more. But it's pay-by-bank services, led by providers like Trustly, that have become the default for a growing share of UK players who want deposits to clear instantly and withdrawals to land the same day. Bookies.com, home of the best Trustly casino sites in the UK, has tracked this shift closely as operators race to offer the fastest possible payment experience.

The numbers behind the sector help explain why speed has become such a competitive edge. Official figures show gross gambling yield for the remote casino, betting and bingo sector reaching £7.8 billion in the year to March 2025, up 13.1% year on year, with online casino products making up roughly £5 billion of that total and slots alone accounting for around £4.2 billion. In its most recent quarterly release, covering April to June 2025, the Gambling Commission recorded £1.49 billion in remote GGY, including £1.4 billion from online casino, with slots GGY up 14% year on year to £745 million on 26.1 billion total bets and spins.

Why Trustly Fits the Moment

Trustly is a Swedish, FCA-regulated open banking provider that connects directly to a player's bank account rather than routing payments through a card network. Deposits tend to clear in seconds. Withdrawals are usually paid back to the same verified account within the day, using the UK's Faster Payments system rather than the multi-day settlement times associated with older banking rails. Major UK banks, including Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest and Santander, all support it, which means most players can use it without setting up anything new.

That combination, speed on both ends and no separate account to manage, has made it one of the fastest growing payment methods in UK online casinos over the past two years.

"Withdrawal speed has overtaken almost everything else as the reason players stick with a site or leave it," said a spokesperson for Bookies.com. "A slow payout used to be a minor annoyance. Now it's often the single biggest driver of churn, and pay-by-bank services are the clearest fix operators have found."

Regulation Is Pushing in the Same Direction

The move toward bank-based payments hasn't happened in isolation. From 19 January 2026, new rules under the Gambling Commission's Social Responsibility Code cut the maximum bonus wagering multiplier from between 30 and 50 times down to just 10 times. Tim Miller, the Commission's Executive Director, said the changes "will better protect consumers from gambling harm."

Tighter bonus rules and traceable, bank-linked payments tend to move in the same direction: toward transactions that are easier to monitor and harder to disguise. A payment made through open banking sits on a player's own bank statement in plain terms, unlike some card or wallet transactions, which can add a layer of transparency that regulators, and increasingly players themselves, seem to want.

That growth isn't a niche behaviour. Separate industry figures put user connections at 16.5 million by December 2025, up from 12.1 million a year earlier, a 36% increase that means close to one in three UK adults now uses open banking in some form. As that habit becomes normal for everyday banking and shopping, its arrival in online casinos looks less like a trend and more like the market simply catching up with where consumers already are.

For a sector that spent the early 2020s adjusting to life without credit cards, the direction of travel now looks settled. Faster payments, tighter bonus rules and a public that already trusts open banking with its everyday money have combined to make pay-by-bank the practical standard rather than the alternative option, with Trustly sitting at the centre of that change for a large share of UK players.