Open Banking
Open banking is the regulated framework that lets licensed third parties initiate payments and read account data directly from bank accounts via APIs — the rails behind pay-by-bank cashier methods.
What it means
Open banking is a regulated framework — originating with PSD2 in the EU and UK — that obliges banks to expose APIs through which licensed third parties can initiate payments from a customer's account and read account data, with the customer's consent. In the cashier it surfaces as pay-by-bank: the player picks their bank, authenticates in their own banking app, and the deposit moves as a direct account-to-account credit transfer. No card number is entered, and no card network sits in the middle.
Why it matters for operators
The economics are the headline. A2A deposits carry no interchange or scheme fees, and because the payment is a credit push authorised by the player in their bank app, there's no chargeback mechanism to fund or defend. Strong customer authentication is built into the bank flow rather than bolted on, which is part of why pay-by-bank tends to convert well once a player has used it.
For iGaming specifically it attacks a familiar pain: card acceptance rates in a category where issuers routinely decline gambling merchant codes. A bank transfer initiated by the player doesn't hit those issuer gambling-MCC decline rules the way a card authorisation does, so in markets where card declines are the bottleneck, pay-by-bank can lift acceptance meaningfully. On the payout side, open banking data plus instant rails supports near-instant withdrawals — increasingly the retention feature that matters most.
The trade-offs are real. Bank API coverage and UX quality vary sharply by market, first-use friction is higher than a saved card, and refunds aren't native to the scheme — returning money means a fresh payout, which your reconciliation and orchestration layer has to model deliberately.
Example
An operator adds pay-by-bank alongside cards in a market where issuers decline a large share of gambling transactions. Deposits routed through open banking clear at a visibly higher rate than cards, cost less per transaction, and generate zero chargebacks — and the cashier starts steering repeat depositors toward the bank flow by default.