Is Open Banking Changing How UK Punters Fund Betting Accounts?

• Providers like Trustly, TrueLayer, and Ecospend are already being integrated across gambling platforms, offering real-time, secure payments.
• Open banking fits perfectly with modern betting behaviour.
• Open banking gives regulators and analysts a full view of betting activity across multiple operators.

Open banking is changing how UK bettors fund their accounts with betting sites, but this trend is a bumpy one. Open banking is a secure, regulated system that allows individuals and businesses to share their financial transaction data with authorised third-party providers (like fintech apps) via APIs, rather than traditional screen-scraping.

The use of its tools it is becoming more prevalent in three areas: payments, compliance, and user experience.

The main source of evidence of the increase in open banking is the requirements set by bookmakers. For example, CopyBet explicitly requires users to complete their first deposit via a banking app secured by Truelayer (a primary provider of Open Banking infrastructure). Like CopyBet, Unibet and Smarkets, now prioritise instant bank transfers for punters to be eligible for sign-up bonuses.

Payments

Open banking bypasses e-wallets (such as PayPal). As a result, bettors' deposits are made directly from a bank account and no card details are required, whether its for deposits or withdrawals. This means that there is less restrictions for bettors, and they never have to leave the app to deposit or withdraw their funds. Open banking suits this betting behaviour. Just think of using your favourite betting app and making one-tap deposits, not needing to re-enter payment details and getting withdrawals far faster. All of the above is even more important for the likes of in-play betting and cash out.

Providers like Trustly, TrueLayer, and Ecospend are already being integrated across gambling platforms to offer these real-time, secure payments. This is particularly relevant post-2020, when credit cards were banned for betting accounts, pushing the market toward alternative funding methods.

Compliance

The second main shift is regulation. The UK Gambling White Paper explicitly highlights open banking as a tool for affordability checks, and bettors may now be asked to share their banking details via secure APIs, instead of uploading documents. Again, this speeds things up and enables financial risk assessments to be done in real time. This data-led monitoring signals a big improvement on from manual checks, such as sending operators your bank statements, payslips etc.

Another aspect of the data-led monitoring is the ability for operators to share information. Open baking allows regulators to view activity across multiple operators, meaning that they can track deposits, withdrawals and spending across multiple accounts. As a result it becomes easier to identify high-risk behaviour and creates a "single customer view". The main reason behind this is that plenty of bettors have multiple accounts and make multiple deposits on them. This insight wasn't previously possible with siloed operator data.

User Experience

Although it's becoming more frequent, it's uptake is by no means universal because there are some barriers. Some bettors still have concerns over privacy and are wary of the data-sharing aspect of it. Habit plays a part, with people used to using apps like PayPal, and there is still limited visibility, with not all bookies promoting open banking. 

There are two sides to this coin. For operators, there is a reduction in thier costs and and improvement in their compliance. For bettors, their user experience is enhanced through its speed and simplicity, but with extra oversight.

The biggest impact open baking is having is behind the scenes, with proper checks happening and regular monitoring. It's likely it'll become an integral part of payments in the UK betting industr, rather than just an alternative.