From registration to withdrawal: Removing friction at scale

How much of your player drop-off happens at registration? How much revenue is lost to card declines, payout delays, and IBAN discrimination?

Open banking payments have moved from a niche alternative to core infrastructure for online gambling operators. In Episode 21 of the Connected with Pragmatic Solutions podcast, our CEO Ashley Lang speaks with Vasilije Lekovic, Vice President of Gaming at Trustly, about the full scope of what pay by bank enables for operators: from faster payments to frictionless onboarding to regulatory compliance.

What pay by bank means for operators

Pay by bank, also referred to as open banking payments or direct bank payments, allows players to deposit and withdraw directly from their bank account, without routing transactions through cards or e-wallets. The practical differences for operators are meaningful. Transaction limits are substantially higher than card payments. There are no card expiry issues. Deposits and withdrawals settle in seconds.

Trustly, founded in Stockholm in 2008, built this infrastructure before the term "open banking" existed and before PSD2 created a regulatory framework for it in Europe. The company now connects over 12,000 banks and processes more than €93 billion in annual transaction volume across 9,000+ merchants.

Local bank accounts and IBAN discrimination

One of the less visible but operationally significant advantages Trustly holds over competitors is its network of local bank accounts in each market it operates. When a player in Italy initiates a payout, it arrives from an Italian bank account, not one registered in another jurisdiction.

This matters because several European markets impose restrictions, sometimes informally, sometimes by policy, on incoming transfers from banks associated with high-risk verticals including gambling. Receiving a payout from a local bank sidesteps this problem entirely. For operators building multi-market strategies, this distinction affects both player experience and payout success rates.

Pay N Play: Instant onboarding without form filling

Traditional player registration requires filling in personal details and uploading identity documents. The friction is well documented: a significant proportion of players abandon the process before completing it.

Trustly's Pay N Play product, launched in 2015, addresses this by pulling bank-level verified KYC data directly from the player's bank (and in some markets, from third-party KYC registries) and delivering a complete, verified player profile to the operator's back end. The player authenticates through their online banking app, makes a deposit, and arrives in a fully created account. No form. No document upload.

The fraud prevention implications are equally significant. Bank-verified identity data is treated as a higher-quality verification source than traditional document review by several gambling regulators. Pay N Play is now standard practice in Sweden and Finland, and is gaining adoption in the UK market. Operators in those markets without a comparable solution are falling behind. This capability connects directly to the registration and KYC tooling within the Pragmatic Solutions PAM platform.

A modular multi-product offering

Trustly's stack is modular. Operators can use it exclusively for deposits and payouts, or layer on additional services: Pay N Play onboarding, affordability assessments using open banking data, name and IBAN verification, and orchestrated local payment methods. Each component can be adopted independently.

The affordability and verification products are particularly relevant in specific regulated markets where gambling regulation now requires operators to assess player spend against financial data. Integrating these checks via the same payment provider that handles deposits reduces operational complexity and the number of vendor relationships an operator must manage. The Pragmatic Solutions Integration Hub supports this kind of modular configuration directly.

Payment orchestration across markets

In markets where the open banking infrastructure does not yet support a fully seamless deposit experience, Trustly combines its core pay by bank capability with local payment champions. In the Netherlands, this means iDEAL (now migrating to Wero). In Belgium, Bancontact. In Portugal, MB WAY. Bizum in Spain and Blik in Poland are in active rollout.

The result is that operators with a multi-market strategy can access the best available payment experience in each jurisdiction through a single integration, rather than managing separate relationships with local providers. For operators managing compliance obligations across multiple jurisdictions, reducing payment infrastructure fragmentation has direct operational and regulatory compliance benefits.

Integration with Pragmatic Solutions

Trustly is pre-integrated into the Pragmatic Solutions PAM platform, meaning operators already on the platform can activate Trustly commercially without a separate technical integration. For operators on other platforms or building direct integrations, Trustly has dedicated onboarding teams across Malta, Stockholm, London, and Lisbon. The CDD process, commercial contract, and technical configuration can be run in parallel, with live timelines of a matter of weeks in straightforward cases.

How Trustly builds long-term operator relationships

Vasilije Lekovic attributes Trustly's long-term client relationships to a combination of reliability, honesty about product limitations, and a product development approach built on direct operator feedback. Pay N Play was not designed as a commercial product first; it was a solution to an onboarding problem operators were raising. The same applies to the affordability products.

For operators evaluating payment partners, this framing matters. A provider that builds from operator problems rather than from internal roadmaps tends to produce tooling that fits the actual operational context, rather than requiring operators to adapt to it.

5 key takeaways

• Pay by bank eliminates card-related failure points: expiry, limits, and IBAN discrimination on payouts. In markets with high card decline rates, this directly affects conversion.

• Pay N Play reduces registration drop-off by removing form-filling entirely, using bank-verified KYC data to create a fully verified player account at the point of first deposit.

• Trustly's local bank account network means payouts in each market come from a local bank, a practical necessity in markets where gambling transactions face discrimination from foreign-registered banks.

• The modular structure means operators can adopt individual components (payments only, payments plus onboarding, plus affordability) without committing to the full stack.

• A single Trustly integration can cover open banking payments and local payment methods across multiple markets, reducing the complexity of managing a multi-market payment stack.

Watch the full episode here.