Open Banking and the Post-Card-Ban Deposit Shift at UK Casinos

Five years after the UK Gambling Commission's credit card ban, the deposit mix at British online gambling operators looks very different from what it did in 2019. Credit cards are no longer permitted for gambling deposits at licensed operators, and the market has adjusted around debit cards, e-wallets, and, increasingly, Open Banking-based Pay by Bank options.

Open Banking is usually discussed in the context of personal finance apps, accounting software, and account-to-account transfers. Gambling is mentioned less often, even though UK-licensed operators appear to have become an important Pay by Bank category for several major providers.

The shift was not originally driven by Open Banking policy. It followed a regulatory change that removed a previously common funding method and pushed operators to look harder at lower-cost bank-based alternatives.

The credit card ban changed the payments mix

In January 2020, the UK Gambling Commission announced a ban on the use of credit cards for gambling. The ban came into force on 14 April 2020 and applied to remote gambling as well as land-based gambling in Great Britain. The stated rationale was consumer protection, particularly the risk associated with gambling with borrowed funds. The UKGC said research had found that 22% of online gamblers who used credit cards were problem gamblers.

In the near term, most displaced volume appears to have shifted to debit cards and e-wallets rather than Open Banking. At that stage, Pay by Bank products were available, but they were not yet a standard checkout option across the sector.

Over time, though, Open Banking payments became more attractive. Deposit flows improved, more banks supported the underlying user journeys, and payment firms such as Trustly, TrueLayer, Volt, and others expanded their merchant coverage. At the same time, operators had an economic incentive to reduce their reliance on card payments where possible.

Open Banking gained share as operator incentives aligned

Public provider commentary suggests gambling has become a significant vertical for Open Banking payments in the UK. Trustly has said iGaming represents a substantial share of its UK Open Banking volume. Trustly UK Open Banking volumes

One reason is cost. While exact pricing varies by operator, acquirer, and provider agreement, Pay by Bank transactions are often cheaper than card-funded deposits and also reduce exposure to chargebacks. For operators processing high volumes of relatively small deposits, that difference can matter.

There is also evidence that Pay by Bank availability is now widespread among UK-facing online casino brands. A market snapshot of UKGC-licensed online casinos suggests Pay by Bank is now common across many leading operators, even if adoption is not yet universal.

Conversion appears to have improved as well, particularly on mobile, although hard public benchmarks remain limited. That makes this a category worth watching, even if the strongest performance data still comes from providers and merchant case studies rather than standardized industry reporting.

VRP and what comes next for iGaming

Variable Recurring Payments, or VRP, are often discussed as the next stage of Open Banking payments in the UK. Sweeping VRP, used for moving money between accounts in the same name, is already in place. Commercial VRP, which would allow broader merchant use cases, has been developing more slowly.

The Joint Regulatory Oversight Committee has set out recommendations for the future development of Open Banking in the UK, including a path toward wider commercial VRP. JROC recommendations on the future development of Open Banking in the UK

Gambling is not generally presented as a first-wave commercial VRP use case. Early focus has been more closely associated with areas such as utility payments, government-related payments, charities, and some financial services applications. Even so, gambling operators and payment providers are likely to be watching closely because the commercial logic is clear.

A merchant-enabled VRP model could, in principle, allow a customer to authorize future deposits within agreed parameters, reducing the need to re-authenticate every transaction. That could improve deposit convenience while still preserving mandate limits and revocation rights. Whether that would sit comfortably within the UK's gambling harm-prevention framework is less clear.

So far, there has been little public indication from the UK Gambling Commission on how it would view VRP in this context. That means any suggestion of a near-term gambling-specific rollout remains speculative.

Why iGaming matters as an Open Banking adoption vertical

Open Banking adoption is often described through use cases such as account aggregation, budgeting tools, and tax payments. Gambling tends to receive less attention for obvious political and regulatory reasons, but it may still be an informative vertical.

Online gambling operators process frequent, relatively low-value transactions and care intensely about payment conversion. When a payment method works in that environment, the lessons can be useful elsewhere. Improvements made by payment initiation service providers for gambling merchants may also benefit merchants in other high-frequency consumer categories.

That does not make gambling the public face of Open Banking adoption, but it does make it relevant to the broader payments story.

Outlook

The credit card ban was not introduced as an Open Banking policy measure, but it appears to have accelerated the conditions under which bank-based payments could gain ground in gambling. The next phase will depend partly on the future shape of commercial VRP in the UK and partly on how gambling regulation interprets payment convenience in relation to consumer protection.

For now, the strongest version of the argument is not that Open Banking has fully replaced cards in UK gambling. It is that the post-ban environment gave Pay by Bank a meaningful opening, and operators have increasingly taken it.