Pay-by-bank goes mainstream as operators cut card dependency

Account-to-account (A2A) payments — “pay by bank” — have quietly become one of the most important deposit and withdrawal rails in regulated European iGaming. What began as a Nordic-led method built on open-banking APIs is now a default option across licensed markets, and it is changing which payment providers operators depend on.

Why operators are moving

The appeal of A2A is threefold. Cost: interchange-free bank transfers undercut card fees at scale. Speed: instant-payment schemes make withdrawals feel immediate, a retention lever in a market where payout speed is a competitive differentiator. And compliance: because A2A pulls verified bank-account data, it dovetails with KYC and source-of-funds checks that regulators increasingly expect.

The PSP landscape shifts

The move rewards payment providers that offer open-banking connectivity, real-time payout rails and the KYC data layer around them — and pressures those whose value was primarily card processing. Operators are consolidating onto orchestration layers that let them route each transaction to the cheapest compliant rail, rather than hard-wiring a single processor.

For suppliers, the message is that payments is no longer a back-office commodity. In markets where bonusing is restricted and tax is rising, shaving payment cost and speeding withdrawals is one of the few margin and retention levers left — which is exactly why the PSP tier of the supplier stack has become a competitive battleground.

Where the friction remains

The shift is not frictionless. Open-banking coverage still varies country by country, because it depends on domestic bank connectivity, the maturity of local instant-payment schemes and how many banks expose reliable APIs. In markets where those rails are patchy, the user experience of a bank redirect can lag the tap-and-go familiarity of a stored card, and adoption tracks how smooth that authentication flow feels. Providers therefore compete not only on price but on connection quality — uptime, the breadth of supported banks, and how gracefully a payment recovers when a bank endpoint fails. Those operational details, invisible to the player, increasingly decide which A2A provider an operator trusts with its deposit funnel.

What it means for the supplier stack

For the wider supplier stack, the move rewards providers that combine open-banking connectivity with the identity and monitoring layer around it, since verified bank data feeds directly into KYC and source-of-funds checks. That convergence is pushing payments and compliance vendors toward each other, and it pressures processors whose value was purely card acquiring to add A2A rails or risk being routed around. Increasingly operators sit behind orchestration layers that treat each processor as interchangeable, selecting the cheapest compliant route per transaction. In that model no single rail is indispensable, and the strategic value migrates to whoever controls the routing and the data rather than the card connection itself.

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