Account-to-Account Payments (A2A)
A2A payments move money directly between bank accounts over instant rails like Faster Payments, SEPA Instant and PIX, with no card network in the middle.
What it means
Account-to-account payments move funds directly from one bank account to another over payment rails — UK Faster Payments, SEPA Instant in the eurozone, PIX in Brazil — without a card scheme in between. Pay-by-bank is the consumer-facing form: the player authorises a transfer from their own account instead of typing card details. Open banking supplies the API layer that makes initiating these transfers from a cashier practical, but A2A is the broader category — any direct bank transfer, initiated through open banking or otherwise, qualifies.
Why it matters for operators
Three properties change the payments equation. Cost: with no card network there's no interchange and no scheme fee, so per-transaction cost drops well below cards. Speed: instant rails settle in seconds, around the clock — funds are actually in the operator's account, not merely authorised, which changes cash-flow and payout timing. Disputes: there's no chargeback mechanism. A credit push authorised by the payer can't be reversed by a card issuer months later; disputes shift to bank transfer recall rules, which are far narrower.
That last point cuts both ways. Chargeback fraud disappears, but so does the card scheme's dispute framework — friendly-fraud losses fall while genuine-error recovery gets harder, and refunds become outbound payouts your reconciliation has to model separately. Fraud pressure moves from stolen cards to account takeover and authorised push payment scams, so the fraud stack needs retooling rather than retiring. And because settlement is instant and final, orchestration and ledger design need to treat A2A as its own flow, not a card variant.
The ceiling on this is visible in Brazil: PIX went from launch in late 2020 to the default payment rail of an entire market, and it's now the dominant deposit method for Brazilian iGaming. That's the existence proof that A2A doesn't have to stay a secondary option next to cards — given the right rail, it becomes the market.
Example
A Brazil-facing operator runs PIX as the primary deposit and withdrawal method. Deposits settle in seconds at a fraction of card cost, withdrawals land fast enough to be a marketing claim, and the dispute queue that card markets take for granted simply doesn't exist.