Setting the scene

Few parts of the gaming & gambling industry have evolved as quickly as the way money moves into and out of a player's account. For years, card payments sat at the centre of the payment mix. Today, rising decline rates, processing costs and growing demand for instant payouts are pushing operators toward a new generation of payment rails.

Open banking is the clearest break from the card model. By moving money directly from bank account to bank account, it removes the card network from the transaction altogether. For operators, that creates an attractive commercial proposition: fewer intermediaries can mean lower processing costs, faster settlement and real-time payouts. Yet despite the promise, open banking remains far from a universal solution. Its success depends heavily on the maturity of local banking infrastructure, regulatory frameworks and consumer behaviour.

Digital wallets solve a different problem. Services such as PayPal, Swish and Vipps MobilePay wrap payments in a familiar, biometric-approved user experience, regardless of whether the underlying funding source is a card, bank account or domestic payment rail. Their strength is not necessarily cost reduction, but trust, convenience and conversion. In many markets, consumers now expect to see their preferred wallet at checkout, making wallet acceptance less of a differentiator and more of a requirement for operators seeking to maximise conversion.

For gaming operators, however, that convenience comes with a growing challenge. The wallet landscape is highly fragmented, with new providers, local champions and alternative payment methods competing. As the ecosystem expands, so do the operational demands of managing different authentication models, verification standards, fraud controls and KYC requirements. Operators must also contend with varying payout capabilities, as not all wallets support withdrawals in the same way across markets, creating additional complexity around customer experience and payment routing. Behind the scenes, fragmented payment flows can also introduce reconciliation challenges, increasing the effort required to match deposits, withdrawals and customer accounts accurately. The result is a payments market that is becoming faster and more consumer-friendly, but also significantly more complex to operate.

Against that backdrop, two roundtables at the Gaming Leaders' Summit examined how operators are deploying open banking and digital wallets, and the challenges and opportunities emerging from their adoption. The first, Open Banking: Faster Payments, Better Margins?, addressed where account-to-account payments are genuinely delivering: on conversion, customer experience, onboarding or cost, as well as how open banking is starting to converge with KYC and identity. The second, Digital Wallets: Fraud Risk & Payments Readiness, turned to the other rail entirely: whether wallets have become a core payment method or remain an emerging alternative and how consistent verification standards really are across providers. Two distinct conversations, but a few findings cut clearly across both.

Finding 1: It's all about a smooth pay-in experience

The single most consistent point across the room was where operators are actually deploying open banking and digital wallets. Almost without exception, the use case was on the pay-in side (in gaming terms, the deposit), where a customer funds their account via a me-to-me transfer from their own bank or wallet into the operator's environment.

This is the moment that matters commercially. The deposit is the first friction point in the customer journey, the place where conversion is won or lost, and the flow where speed, certainty and a familiar payment method translate most directly into completed transactions.

There was also a striking consensus on economics. Across almost all markets represented, pay-in transactions were reported to be cost-free for customers. Romania was the notable exception, where a government tax regime adds a cost layer to every deposit. Since January 2019, Romanian online gambling operators have been obliged to pay a monthly 2% tax calculated on the total participation fees (effectively, player deposits) taken in each month. So, while the pay-in is broadly cost-neutral elsewhere in Europe, in Romania every deposit carries a built-in fiscal charge, a distinction operators have to factor directly into their market economics.

Finding 2: Adoption is shaped by local habit and legacy

If there was one idea that animated both sessions, it was how heavily payment method adoption is dictated by local market behaviour built up over years. Several markets simply arrive with "default" payment habits baked in:

• The UK: Regulation and a maturing open banking ecosystem are accelerating pay-by-bank adoption and instant-payment experiences, with much of the infrastructure already available through established providers.
• Germany: Sofort (now part of Klarna) remains a well-established bank-transfer method, while PayPal continues to occupy a strong position due to long-standing consumer familiarity and trust. Usage remains prevalent across operators, although its dominance is gradually eroding.
• France: PayPal continues to hold significant ground as a trusted default, sitting alongside strong domestic card usage.
• The Netherlands: iDEAL is effectively the national standard, accounting for the majority of online payments. Its widespread adoption has familiarised consumers with account-to-account payment journeys, making open banking experiences feel more intuitive than in many other European markets.
• The Nordics: Sweden's Swish and Norway's Vipps MobilePay (now merged into a single Nordic group) dominate as instant, mobile-first, bank-backed wallets with near-universal consumer penetration.
• Spain: Bizum, the banks' own instant mobile transfer scheme, has rapidly become a mainstream payment habit and a near-mandatory option for local relevance.
• Turkey: Open banking adoption is being driven less by consumer preference and more by regulation and market structure.

Turkey deserves a closer look, because it was a vivid example of how regulation and infrastructure (not just consumer habit) shape what an operator has to build. Open banking there is strict and state-orchestrated: providers are required to connect through the Interbank Card Center (BKM) infrastructure, with banks mandated to share account data through standardised APIs under the central bank's consolidated supervision. This pushes operators toward direct bank relationships rather than routing through a single third-party aggregator, which was the approach described by one operator during the discussion.

Finding 3: Benefits are clear, but challenges remain

The discussions also highlighted that neither model is without its challenges. For open banking, the commercial benefits are clear: lower processing costs, reduced fraud exposure, faster settlement and the growing potential to combine payments with identity and KYC processes. Yet, adoption remains uneven. While markets such as the Netherlands and Germany benefit from mature payment infrastructure and broad bank participation, elsewhere progress continues to be constrained by patchy connectivity and varying levels of bank engagement. The result is an experience that can differ significantly between markets and institutions, making it difficult for operators to deliver a consistently seamless customer journey.

Digital wallets face a different challenge. Their value proposition is well understood: a familiar user experience, streamlined authentication and support for onboarding and verification journeys. Yet the wallet landscape itself remains highly fragmented, with a mix of global providers, domestic champions and emerging alternatives competing for consumer attention. For operators, this creates difficult decisions around which wallets to support and how to balance local payment preferences against operational complexity. Supporting multiple wallet schemes can improve coverage and conversion, but it also increases the burden of integration, reconciliation, fraud management and ongoing maintenance.

This tension between standardisation and fragmentation fed one of the liveliest debates of the day: whether Wero could eventually provide a unifying layer across Europe's fragmented wallet ecosystem. The appetite for a pan-European solution is clearly there. Whether the gaming sector ultimately forms part of that vision, however, remains an open question.

Looking ahead

Taken together, the discussions reinforced a simple reality: there is no single winning payment rail. Open banking and digital wallets are solving different problems, but both are becoming increasingly important components of the operator payment stack. The direction of travel is clear: faster payments, lower friction and more integrated identity and verification experiences. At the same time, consumers continue to choose payment methods for different reasons, whether convenience, familiarity, trust or speed, and those preferences vary significantly between markets. The challenge for operators is therefore not deciding whether to embrace these models, but supporting the payment methods their customers expect while navigating the local market dynamics, infrastructure constraints and ecosystem complexities that continue to shape adoption.

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The content of this article does not reflect the official opinion of Edgar, Dunn & Company. The information and views expressed in this publication belong solely to the author(s).

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