We've spent six years building Open Banking payments for UK businesses. This year we started taking that stack into iGaming, and the first thing that struck me in operator conversations was how familiar the complaints sounded — and how differently they get framed.
Every operator I speak to describes their payments problem as a list. Deposit conversion is one item. Verification friction is another. Withdrawal speed is a third. They're owned by different people, measured on different dashboards, and usually solved by different vendors.
They are not three problems. They're one loop, and it's open at both ends.
The loop, and where it leaks
Think about what actually happens across a player's lifetime with you.
They sign up and you need to know who they are. They deposit and you need the money to arrive. At some point they cross a spending threshold and you need to assess them. They win and they want their money, fast. Then they come back and do it again.
Each of those moments involves the same underlying question — is this a real person, with a real bank account, and is that account the same one every time? — and most operators answer it separately at every stage, using a different tool, with no memory between them.
That's where the leaks are:
Verification that asks for documents. Document upload is the point where a meaningful share of signups stop being signups. It's also where your onboarding team's cost sits. And when the Gambling Commission's own commentary notes that the industry's current approach to document checks pushes some players towards the unlicensed market, that's not just a conversion problem — it's a channelisation problem for the whole licensed sector.
Deposits on rails that weren't built for this. Credit cards have been off the table for GB gambling since 2020, so you're running debit and e-wallets. You're paying scheme fees on every deposit, carrying chargeback exposure, and dealing with declines from issuers who treat your MCC as a reason to be nervous. None of that gets better with volume.
Withdrawals that can't confirm where they're going. A payout to a card is a payout to a token. Closed-loop discipline — money leaves by the route it came in, to an account you've verified — gets harder to evidence the more payment methods you support, and it's exactly what your AML controls are supposed to demonstrate.
Assessment that starts from scratch. When a player does need a financial risk assessment and the frictionless route doesn't work, the fallback is asking them for bank statements. You are asking a customer who has done nothing wrong to email you PDFs of their financial life, and then waiting while someone reads them.
Fix any one of these and the other three cap your gains. Faster payouts don't rescue a signup flow that lost the player at document upload. Cheaper deposits don't help if withdrawals are the reason they left.
What closing the loop looks like
Open Banking answers the underlying question once, at the bank, and then keeps the answer.
When a player connects their bank account, three things become true at the same time. You know the account is theirs, because their bank authenticated them. You have a payment rail into that account. And you have a payout rail back out of it, to the same verified destination. Deposit, verification and withdrawal stop being three integrations and become three views of one relationship.
That's the loop. Here's how we've built it at Fena.
Bank-verified account ownership. Our AIS permissions let a player confirm account ownership by logging into their own banking app. Name matching happens against bank records rather than a document someone photographed on a kitchen table. For the small number of players who need a financial risk assessment that can't be completed frictionlessly, this is the alternative to a statement request — consented, read-only, and done in under a minute instead of over three days.
Pay by Bank deposits. The player authenticates with their bank, the money moves over Faster Payments, and it's settled and irreversible. No interchange. No chargebacks, because there is no chargeback mechanism on a push payment the customer authorised themselves. No issuer sitting between you and a legitimate deposit deciding how it feels about gambling this month. And no card details in your environment.
Instant payouts, in batch. Withdrawals go out through Bulk Payments to the verified account the deposit came from. Run them continuously or in scheduled batches, with one file and one authorisation, and with the closed loop evidenced by design rather than reconstructed afterwards.
QR and Pay by Link for the awkward cases. Retail, on-course, in-venue, or any moment where the player isn't already inside your app — the same rails, delivered differently.
Why this is the compliance argument, not just the cost argument
Most Open Banking pitches lead with price. Lower fees are real, and on deposit volumes they're material. But for a licensed operator, that's the second-best reason.
The better one is that a closed loop built on bank-authenticated payments gives you something your compliance function currently has to assemble by hand: a single, consistent view of who a player is, where their money comes from, and where it goes back to. Identity is confirmed at source. Every deposit is strongly authenticated by the player's own bank. Every payout lands in a verified account. Your transaction monitoring works from one clean data set rather than four partial ones.
The Commission updated its money laundering and terrorist financing risk assessment for the industry in July 2026, and several of the red flags it highlights — unusual numbers of payment types on one account, obscured sources of funds — are precisely the things a closed loop makes visible instead of hiding.
Where we fit
We're not the biggest Open Banking provider in the UK, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What we offer operators is a single provider covering verification, deposits and payouts under one FCA authorisation, with direct access to the people who built it and who make the underwriting decisions.
That last part matters more in this sector than most. iGaming operators are used to being a risk category rather than a customer. We'd rather have the conversation properly, understand your licence position, your player base and your volumes, and tell you honestly whether we're the right fit.
If your deposits, your verification and your payouts are currently three vendors who don't talk to each other, it's worth an hour to map where the loop is open.
Talk to us about iGaming payments - email sales@fena.co
Article by
Gosia Furmanik
CEO and Founder
Published on
