Beyond the card: a practical look at Pay by Bank for iGaming

Watch a player make a first deposit by card. They type sixteen digits, an expiry date and a security code, maybe get pushed to a 3D Secure screen, and then sometimes get declined anyway because their bank has blocked gambling transactions. If they win, they may wait days to see the money back.

None of this is anyone's fault. The card was designed for a world of shop counters and signed receipts, and online gambling was bolted onto it decades later. Operators have spent years working around those limits. It's worth asking whether they still need to.

What cards really cost you

The processing fee on your statement is only the visible part. Gambling transactions sit in a high-risk category, which usually means higher acquiring rates, rolling reserves that tie up your cash, and less bargaining power when you renegotiate.

Then there are chargebacks. A player who loses a session and regrets it can dispute the deposit, and you carry the cost of fighting it whether you win or not. Stolen card details feed bonus abuse, where fraudsters open multiple accounts to farm welcome offers and leave you with the disputes when the real cardholders notice.

Compliance adds more. A card number doesn't reliably tell you who is behind it, so matching the payer to the registered player takes extra checks and extra headcount. In the UK, credit cards have been off the table for gambling since April 2020, so the debit card has carried the whole load, with all these frictions attached.

Players judge you on your withdrawals

Deposits get most of the attention, but withdrawals are where trust is won or lost. A player who waits days for winnings doesn't blame the card scheme. They blame you, and then they tell people.

Fast, predictable payouts are one of the strongest retention tools an operator has. Cards were built to move money from customer to merchant, and reversing that flow has always been awkward.

What Pay by Bank changes

With Pay by Bank, the player picks their bank at checkout and approves the payment in their banking app, usually with a fingerprint or face scan. The money moves over Faster Payments straight from their account to yours. There's no card number to type, store or steal.

That changes several things at once:

• Security: Strong customer authentication is performed by the player's own bank, so no stolen credentials can be replayed on your site.

• Disputes: Open Banking payments don't go through the card chargeback system, which takes away most of the "friendly fraud" problem.

• Identity: Payments come from a real bank account, so you can match who paid against who registered.

• Closed loop: Withdrawals can go back to the same verified account that funded the deposit. This is one of the simplest anti-money-laundering controls available, and it stops third-party funding.

• Cost: No interchange, no scheme fees and no chain of intermediaries each taking a cut.

Data that supports safer gambling

Open Banking isn't only about moving money. With the player's explicit consent, Account Information Services give you a read-only view of their bank account. That view can support affordability and source-of-funds checks without asking players to upload PDF bank statements, which they dislike and your team has to process by hand.

The player decides what to share and can withdraw consent at any time. For operators under growing pressure to show they know their customers, a consented, bank-sourced view is a far better basis for a decision than a screenshot.

Where Fena fits

Fena Labs is authorised and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority as a payment institution (FRN 934835) for both Payment Initiation and Account Information Services. We've spent six years building Open Banking payments in the UK, and we understand how high-risk merchants are underwritten because we do that work ourselves.

For iGaming operators, that means:

• Pay by Bank for instant deposits, through a hosted checkout or directly via our API

• Pay by Link for assisted or VIP top-ups arranged by your customer support team

• Bulk Payments for player withdrawals and affiliate payouts

• Account Information Services for consented, bank-verified data to support your KYC, AML and safer-gambling checks

So, is the card finished?

Not tomorrow. Plenty of players will keep reaching for their debit card out of habit, and they should be able to. But the default is shifting. A generation of players already approves almost everything in a banking app, and to them a bank payment feels quicker than a card form.

Operators don't need to remove cards to benefit. The practical step is to put Pay by Bank first in your cashier, use it for withdrawals, and measure what happens to conversion, disputes and support tickets. The numbers will tell you how fast to move.

A world without cards may still be some way off. A world where cards aren't the default is much closer.

Ready to see Pay by Bank in your cashier? Book a demo with Fena →