Trustly Slot Sites

Trustly Slot Sites

An increasing number of UK slot sites and casinos have enabled Trustly deposits and withdrawals.  But how does this innovative and relatively new payment method work, and what advantages does it have over a debit card?

1. What Is Trustly?
2. What Is Open Banking?
3. How To Sign Up For Trustly
4. How To Deposit With Trustly
5. Advantages Of Trustly
6. Disadvantages Of Trustly
7. Safety & Security With Trustly
8. Trustly & Casino Bonuses
9. Which Online Casinos Accept Trustly?
10. Alternatives To Trustly
11. The Future Of Trustly

What Is Trustly?

Trustly is the brainchild of a Swedish fintech company that was founded shortly after the iPhone first became popular and whose product was designed from the start to work with smartphones. It is a way to use your bank account to deposit to and withdraw from an online gambling site (or anywhere else, for that matter) quickly, easily and securely.  Trustly works via Open Banking which arrived in the UK in 2018. Trustly payments can be made to and from more than 3300 banks across 29 European countries.  Trustly is regulated in Sweden and was able to operate in the UK as a result of the FCA’s Temporary Permissions Regime which ran until the end of December 2023 after which it would need to be extended by the Treasury, but now they have secured permanent permission to operate in the UK by buying Ecospend Technologies Limited who already had FCA authorisation.  Since March 2023, the UK version of Trustly has actually been this subsidiary company using Trustly as a trading name.

What Is Open Banking?

According to the official UK Open Banking informational website, open banking “connects banks, third parties and technical providers – enabling them to simply and securely exchange data to their customer’s benefit”.  You may think that sounds very Big Brother, but on the other hand you may very well already be happily using it along with 6 million others in the UK in the form of apps and products like these:

• Your bank’s mobile app (if it supports open banking)
• VibePay – an app for splitting the bill for holidays, meals out, concert tickets and so on
• CreditLadder – an app which verifies and reports your on-time rent payments and sends them to your credit file to improve your rating
• Emma – a personal finance and budgeting tool
• Moneybox – a savings and investment tool
• Pledjar – an app that rounds up your bank payments and donates the spare pennies to charities of your choice as well as offering other opportunites to donate
• Untied – an app that makes tax sense of all your transactions for your tax return

In all of these cases, you authorise a trusted third party to access your accounts via an API, retrieve, securely store and process information. In some cases (credit checking) information may be passed on and in others (the bill splitting app, the charity app) payments made.  Think it sounds a bit sinister?  Maybe it does, but it’s clearly here to stay; in May 2022 there were a record one billion open banking API calls in the UK and five million open banking payments were made.

When you use Trustly to make a deposit at (or a withdrawal from) a gambling site, you never need to give your bank details or card details to the operator.  One might hazard a guess that one of the reasons Trustly is increasingly popular as a deposit method at online casinos is that players feel more comfortable sending a payment via Trustly than they would giving their card details to the casino!

How To Sign Up For Trustly

Trick question!  You don’t need to sign up for Trustly!  Nor do you need to download an app, and it’s completely free to use.  All you need is a current account with a bank that has signed up to Open Banking.  Most but not all of the UK banks have (there’s a list on the Open Banking website) .  You don’t even need to check whether yours does before attempting to use Trustly to make a deposit at a slot site or casino as you can check as part of the process!

How To Deposit With Trustly

To make a deposit at an online casino using Trustly, select Trustly at the cashier.  Once you’ve entered the amount you want to deposit, the currency and any bonus codes, you’ll be shown a list of banks.  If your bank is on the list or can be found in a search, it’s signed up to Open Banking and you can go ahead and complete the deposit.  Choose your bank and you’ll be redirected to your bank’s online gateway to log in and confirm the payment.  After you’ve completed the deposit you’ll be returned to the slot site to continue playing without needing to log in again.  Trustly deposits normally take effect instantly.

To withdraw using Trustly, you also start by selecting Trustly on the cashier screen.  Again, you select the bank you want to withdraw to and enter your account details.  Trustly withdrawals can take 1-2 days but even so are generally quicker than many other withdrawal methods.

Advantages Of Trustly

• Speed
• Security
• No need to send card details over the internet or give them to the casino
• No charges

Disadvantages Of Trustly

Assuming that you’re happy with the whole idea of open banking, Trustly doesn’t really have any disadvantages.

Safety & Security With Trustly

All Trustly payments require 2FA (two factor authentication) via an authorisation code or biometrics – i.e. fingerprint or facial recognition.  This requires you to have a smartphone.  When you deposit via Trustly from a desktop device, you may be shown a QR code which you can scan to carry out the authentication on your phone.

Trustly & Casino Bonuses

We have not heard of ANY cases where using Trustly as a deposit method at a UK slot site has disqualified a player from getting a bonus.  Quite the reverse, actually – at one point Aspire casinos were offering a special bonus code on Trustly deposits to encourage players to use it.

Which Online Casinos Accept Trustly?

Skill On Net , Aspire, White Hat and Grace Media are some of the casino networks that currently accept Trustly payments from UK players, and there are many independent casinos that also accept it.

Alternatives To Trustly

Trustly is the only open banking payment method that is widely accepted at UK slot sites.

If you don’t want to use Trustly and don’t want to use a debit card, the most commonly available alternative is everyone’s favourite e-wallet, Paypal.  At some sites you can also use prepaid voucher payment systems such as Paysafe and Neosurf, but these can normally only be used to deposit, not withdraw.

The Future Of Trustly

Trustly is a pretty futuristic payment method as it stands and we expect any tweaks to focus on making the 2FA process more convenient while remaining super secure.

Trustly has proven especially popular in Scandinavian countries where a number of operators have partnered with them to create Pay’N’Play Casinos.  Otherwise known as no-account casinos, these sites let players gamble using Trustly for deposits and withdrawals without having to create a casino account or supply any personal details.  All of the identity verification is carried out by Trustly.  Scan’N’Play is another Trustly add-on feature which uses QR codes to enable a similar no-account experience for players at land based venues.

Currently Pay’N’Play casinos are not allowed in the UK but it seems possible that they could be in the future if Trustly were to take responsibility for affordability checks and automated monitoring of player behaviour for risk markers as well as for account and age verification.  All this could be done using the power of open banking but for it to work properly, Trustly would need to be the only deposit method that players could use.

Indeed, if all deposits were to be done via Trustly, they would be in a far better position to monitor player behaviour than any operator as they would be able to process information about deposits made with different operators.  Connect the whole system up to GAMSTOP and they could handle self-exclusion as well by blocking all gambling payments!

As a vision of the future, this may sound dystopian but many players would prefer it to the kind of affordability checks that are now becoming widespread, where players are asked to send copies of their payslips and bank statements to operators.

Sue Dawson

Head of Content

Sue Dawson has been writing about (and playing) online bingo and slots since 2013, putting her unique spin on everything.  She has written pieces for iGaming industry news sites, appeared on panels at industry events and on podcasts, helped to judge industry awards and is a member of industry think tank Ampersand Plus.

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