After eight years of being told it would replace the card, open banking finally has the numbers: Open Banking Limited has counted more than one billion payments and 100 billion API calls since launch, with variable recurring payments up 6.7% month on month in June. Yet one large, tightly regulated consumer checkout still treats pay-by-bank as an afterthought.
Online gambling in Britain moves billions of pounds a year through a payment stack that looks oddly dated next to the rest of fintech: debit cards, a handful of e-wallets and a regulator that increasingly wants to know whose money it is.
Why gambling checkouts are different
The shape of that stack was set in April 2020, when the Gambling Commission banned credit cards for online and most offline gambling. At the time it said 22% of online gamblers using credit cards were problem gamblers. Spending moved to debit cards and e-wallets more or less overnight.
E-wallets brought their own gatekeeping. PayPal’s acceptable use policy lists gambling among the activities that need its approval in advance, and only where both the operator and the customer are in jurisdictions where it is legal. In practice a UK player will only find PayPal at a site licensed by the Commission, and not at every one of those. The wallet ends up doing a slice of compliance work that the card schemes never took on.
The withdrawal gap
For the customer, paying in is the easy part. Card, wallet or bank transfer, the money usually lands within seconds, because operators have every commercial reason to make deposits painless. The friction sits at the other end, when a player asks for their winnings back.
At the licensed casinos that still take PayPal, the rail is rarely the bottleneck. Every one of them settles through the same wallet, yet figures logged by iGaming.com, a comparison site that tracks each operator’s PayPal limits, put payout times anywhere from under an hour to three days, with minimum withdrawals between £5 and £20.
That spread has little to do with PayPal and a lot to do with each operator’s review queue, identity checks and payout batching. It also tempers open banking’s usual pitch. An instant account-to-account transfer can only speed up a withdrawal the operator has already decided to release, and the wait players notice most belongs to the business, not the bank.
Where open banking fits
The more promising opening for pay-by-bank is data. In July the Gambling Commission confirmed that financial risk assessments will arrive in stages, starting with the largest operators and customers whose net deposits pass £5,000 in a rolling 24 hours, or £2,500 for under-25s. Most assessments are meant to run quietly through credit reference agencies, with no documents involved. Where that fails, the regulator names open banking as one of the routes operators can use instead.
Consented account data can show a customer’s position without a payslip upload or a bank statement emailed to a support desk. It also comes with a security record operators can point to: fraud on open banking payments ran at 0.013% of transactions by volume between March 2024 and September 2025, against an industry average of 0.045%.
A limit held at the bank
Variable recurring payments, singled out as the growth area when the ecosystem passed the billion-payment mark, could go further. Since October 2025 operators have had to prompt customers to set a financial limit before their first deposit. A mandate with a ceiling held at the bank, rather than inside the gambling account, would be harder to raise in the middle of a session.
None of this makes gambling an easy market for open banking providers. Operators guard their checkout conversion closely, wallets already hold customer trust, and the Commission has set no timetable beyond the first stage of its rollout. But the sector’s payment question has shifted from how fast money goes in to who can show, quickly and without paperwork, that it should.