Instant Payouts, open banking, and why European casino withdrawals often beat American ones on speed

This number rarely gets mentioned, but in most US-licensed online casinos, you may need to wait up to 48 hours for a withdrawal to clear. Now, if you log into a Nordic Pay N Play casino that is built on top of open banking rails, your withdrawal can be processed in under 5 minutes and may reach your bank account even faster. You have the same game, the same win, and a very different infrastructure supporting the experience.

This is not a case of different regions having different attitudes toward speed. It is a case of different regions having different strategies that have developed over the last 10 years. The EU's Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) required EU banks to provide licensed third-party service providers with access to banking services and payment systems through secure Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). After that framework was adopted across the EU, it created a bank-to-casino payment system that can be fast and direct, without the casino having to wait for overnight batch payment processing.

For a North American reader, the easiest way to appreciate what this looks like in practice is to look at a European-licensed casino built on these direct bank-transfer rails, as opposed to the card-and-intermediary stack that most North American players are used to. At Don.ro Casino, which is incorporated in Malta and licensed to operate in Romania, the deposit and withdrawal system is what draws the most attention from first-time users: no staging account, no waiting on a third-party processor to clear funds, and money moving the way bank transfers should move in 2026. When people make bank transfers, the money can move in real time, and that is the kind of experience Don.ro offers compared with older payment models. In the US, after UIGEA of 2006, banks became cautious about the legal gray zone around online gambling payments. As a result, US casinos often offer workarounds like casino debit cards and e-wallets as the fastest payment options. Both models are doing very different things with payments.

What PSD2 actually did

Prior to PSD2 coming into force, online banking processes in Europe looked more like they still do in North America: delays due to payment transaction intermediaries and settlement in banking networks. PSD2 offered new terms at the banking level in Europe.

The directive, which became fully operative across the EU in 2019, required banks to set up secure APIs to allow licensed third-party providers to access payment systems with customers’ consent. While this may sound dull, in practice it meant that a licensed payment service could create a direct payment from a customer's bank account to a casino account. There would be no payment card networks, no payment processors, and no unnecessary delays while payment funds are settled by a payment processor. No more payment delays caused by batch settlement that occurs at 3 AM.

Re-engineering payment systems created the opportunity to reduce payment steps from multiple interfaces to a single payment pipeline. This is the primary innovation. The use of payment systems to enable casino payment transactions directly from the customer’s bank, in seconds, without registration, and with fast withdrawals, is one of the ideas built upon this payment infrastructure.

Trustly and the creation of Pay N Play

The innovation of using payment infrastructure to provide casino payment services was pioneered by Trustly, a Swedish fintech founded in Stockholm in 2008, with the aim of providing customers fast bank payments. For many years, Trustly was a payment method that, while useful, was not particularly transformative. This changed in 2016 when Trustly launched an innovative new payment service.

Pay N Play reduced the need to register and verify an identity through the usual separate steps. Instead, players deposit money, authorize the transfer through Trustly, and the casino pulls the necessary identity data. Pay N Play casinos launched in Sweden, Finland and Germany. Since then, the number of players has grown significantly in the Nordic region. Many fast-withdrawal casinos operate with Trustly or similar providers. Competitors have since launched, including Zimpler, founded in Gothenburg in 2012, and Brite, founded in Stockholm in 2019. Thanks to this competitive market, there is a strong focus on fast withdrawals and low fees, exactly what was intended with PSD2.

SEPA Instant: the backbone of fast banking

Pay N Play providers were able to reduce the old multi-day wait time thanks to SEPA. Trustly, along with its peers, has a fast money movement service as a result of banking technology built for fast transfers.SEPA Instant Credit Transfer, a standard for real-time transfers and instant settlement within the eurozone, is the backbone of this technology.

In recent years, SEPA Instant was voluntary for banks. However, in March 2024, the European Parliament passed Regulation (EU) 2024/886, establishing that starting in October 2025, every bank within the eurozone that offers SEPA Credit Transfer will be required to provide SEPA Instant at no extra cost to the customer.

Consider what this means on an infrastructure level. If a player initiates a withdrawal from a casino through the open banking API, the withdrawal can clear and arrive at the player's bank account via the SEPA Instant rail in a matter of seconds. The five-minute timeframe or less that Pay N Play casinos advertise is not idle marketing. It is an indication of what payment rails are actually capable of when there are no impediments.

The reasoning behind the Malta Gaming Authority's relevance to this story

The long answer to the question of how European-licensed casinos offer payment methods to players spanning multiple countries begins with Malta.

The Malta Gaming Authority (MGA) was the first regulator of online gambling in the EU, and it started doing so in 2001. This gave a first-mover advantage to Malta-licensed operators for many years. As an EU member state, MGA operators work inside a familiar European regulatory environment. This likely explains why many online casinos in Europe, which often target players outside Malta, are incorporated in Malta. This shows why the MGA holds such an important place in this industry.

An example would be the Romanian market. Though Romania has its own online gambling licenses, companies with both an MGA license and a Romanian license operate within two interconnected markets. The payment infrastructure Romanian operators use is the same PSD2-compliant, open banking system as the rest of the EU. A withdrawal from a Malta-licensed, Romania-based casino can go through the same SEPA Instant system as a withdrawal from a casino based in Sweden.

The US model, simply explained

The US market follows a unique trajectory and yields distinct results. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA) did not make all online gambling illegal, but instead placed restrictions on banking connected to unlawful internet gambling. As a result, banks interpreted this as a caution to avoid such transactions. Although individual states began licensing and regulating online casinos, the banking infrastructure did not catch up in the same way. Banks remain cautious.

The impact of this caution on players using licensed and regulated US casinos is that the most efficient ways to receive payments are often PayPal, Venmo and Play+ prepaid cards. These methods were developed to work around banking issues. As such, they are layers on top of a payment system that was not created for online casino payments.

This is not a criticism of casinos. It illustrates the nature of the payments environment in the US. Casino operators in the US are working within the payment caution banks have had for the last 20 years. They also work in a fragmented licensing environment of individual states and do not have open banking frameworks like the EU's PSD2. Canada is an example of an environment with constraints adjacent to the US. That is why, to North American observers, the payment systems in Europe appear to be modeled on completely different frameworks.

What a North American player can learn from this

The main idea is not very hard to figure out. For a player based in Canada who has used only North American casino platforms in the past, the European model would likely feel different, especially in the way a withdrawal clears. This difference is more apparent in the way a withdrawal clears than in the selection of games offered, as many gaming providers are the same across continents.

In the Nordic region, Pay N Play is not boasting about five-minute withdrawals. It is telling you what payment rails can actually do. It is an effect of building infrastructure over the last decade, with the combination of real-time settlement and regulations that forced banks to open their payment rails. The layer that was built was constructed on top of all of this rather than around it. To see just how purposefully this layer was built, look at what Pay N Play accomplishes under the hood. When a player starts a new session, the payment is cleared in real time, and the operator receives a confirmed, KYC-supported customer before a single spin is even done. There is no lag from tokenized card transactions with a third-party processor, and settlement is not batched and completed at the end of the day.

The Swedish fintech Trustly, which built the dominant version of this infrastructure, spent many years negotiating direct API connections with Nordic and broader European banks. This means that funds move more like an internal bank transfer instead of an international transfer. This is a significant difference. For operators in the European Union, and especially for operators in Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands that use this infrastructure, players have come to expect a cashout that is instant.

Romanian-licensed systems are developing models that more closely align with EU directives. No-account casino systems illustrate that models based on reducing friction are already gaining interest in Eastern European markets as well. There is currently no equivalent structure in the US market. Canada, which has some banking systems that resemble that caution, sits closer to the US model than the European model when it comes to payment speed for casinos.

Why the European infrastructure gap is harder to close than it seems

The gap in infrastructure is harder to close than it seems. Licensing is complex and can span many jurisdictions. There are language, currency and timing differences, as well as MGA licenses and national licenses. In terms of the speed at which money is transferred, the EU has the advantage, but it is mostly dependent on the payment systems rather than how the casino operators manage their business. Banking systems are connected, settlement happens in real time, and the regulatory framework was built to accommodate these systems.