Credit cards are almost gone from US betting. The rail that replaces them carries data.

DraftKings stopped taking credit card deposits in August 2025. Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote to 11 operators about cash advance fees on February 6, 2026. FanDuel announced its ban five days later and took credit cards off the table for good on March 2, 2026. BetMGM began phasing them out at the end of March. bet365 and Caesars both moved in April. Fanatics never took credit cards in the first place.

That’s the top of the US market gone in about 18 months, with no federal rule forcing it.

The states have been moving on a separate track. Nine already prohibit credit card funding for online betting, including Iowa, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Illinois and Rhode Island. Virginia’s House Bill 515 (HB 515) took effect on July 1. Maine went further in April and covered iGaming alongside sports betting. Ohio’s Casino Control Commission has a rule in progress, Colorado passed a bill through both chambers in May, and Maryland has one moving too.

I’d bet on most of the remaining holdouts closing within the year.

The revenue hit was small, which is why people stopped paying attention

The sell-side reaction was a shrug. Macquarie put credit cards at 10% to 20% of US gambling account deposits. Citizens JMP looked at DraftKings’ handle in the months after its ban, found nothing material, and described the wave of operator announcements as a headline rather than a business event.

Both are right about the P&L. The number underneath it is the one worth sitting with: Macquarie’s analyst also pointed out that those deposits punch above their weight, because they skew towards new and casual users.

Small volume, then, landing almost entirely at the moment an operator has the least information about a player and the most to lose. A new customer whose card gets declined at 2pm on a Sunday doesn’t email support. They close the app.

What the UK actually did after 2020

Britain is the obvious read-across, and the detail gets misremembered.

The UK Gambling Commission banned credit cards for all gambling on April 14, 2020, citing research that classified 22% of online gamblers using credit cards as problem gamblers. A subsequent study by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) found that 76% of people who had been gambling with borrowed money stopped borrowing-to-gamble altogether, with no evidence of a move towards illegal lending. On its own terms, the policy worked.

As a payments event, most of the displaced volume went to debit cards and e-wallets. Pay by Bank existed in 2020, but it wasn’t a standard checkout option across the sector, so it absorbed very little at first. Open banking took share gradually over the following four years, as bank coverage widened, deposit flows stopped breaking, and operators worked out what card processing was really costing them.

The ban removed a default and left a gap. Filling that gap took years, and the operators who moved early on it, I would argue, now run noticeably cheaper payment stacks than the ones who waited.

Debit is a weaker landing spot in the US than it was in Britain

UK debit works fine for gambling. US debit is closer to a coin flip.

MCC 7995, the merchant category code that flags a transaction as gambling, tells the issuing bank what it’s looking at, and plenty of US issuers decline it as a blanket policy regardless of whether the operator is licensed in that state. Published decline estimates vary by source and none of them are flattering: somewhere between 30% and 50% for US card deposits, against 5% to 10% in ordinary e-commerce.

The two methods that absorbed UK volume in 2020 are therefore structurally weaker here. PayPal and Play+ pick up much of the slack instead, and both insert a fee layer and a layer of separation between the operator and the player’s actual bank account.

That’s the cost and conversion case for bank rails, and it’s the one the payments industry makes most often.

Every deposit method has a data payload, and cards have almost none

A card deposit tells you one thing: it cleared, or it didn’t. You get a token, a BIN (the card’s bank identification number) and an authorization response. Nothing about the person holding the card.

A bank-linked deposit is a different object. When a player connects their account, the connection returns transaction history alongside the payment itself. With consent, that’s the balance before the deposit went out, whether income lands on a regular cycle, and whether the money funding tonight’s deposit came from a salary payment or a loan disbursement.

The part cards can never reach is what’s happening everywhere else. An operator sees its own deposits and nothing beyond them. It has no view of the four other apps on the same phone. Bank data does, and pan-operator spend is the most useful affordability input available in this market, because a player putting USD$200 a month through your app might be putting USD$2,000 through the sector.

Set that against how affordability actually gets assessed today. Self-reported income at sign-up, which players routinely inflate. A credit bureau pull, which is thin, lagging, and tells you about mortgage conduct rather than discretionary spend. Or behavioral triggers built on play patterns, which only fire after several months of activity, by which point the harm has been accumulating for a while.

Bank data is the only one of those available on the first deposit, and the first deposit is now the exact point the credit card exit has disrupted.

This is the problem we’ve spent the last three years solving at Yaspa. Our award-winning Intelligent Payments solution takes the deposit and the player intelligence off the same consented connection, so affordability signal and cohort segmentation exist from day zero rather than arriving after three months of play history. One integration, both outputs.

Operators tend to underestimate how quickly players move once the option is there. Across the operator integrations we launched in the past year, open banking reached above 20% of total deposit volume within three months of go-live, once it sat alongside cards as an equal option at checkout rather than a secondary one.

Guaranteed ACH sits underneath all of it. Bank deposits carry return exposure, that exposure is why plenty of operators throttle ACH limits, and throttled limits are how you push the VIP cohort back towards whatever card options survive. We take the return risk onto our own book, so an operator can open the rail up properly instead of running it as a hedge.

The regulation stacking up behind the ban

Credit card bans rarely travel alone. Colorado’s bill carries betting limit provisions. Maryland’s is framed as consumer protection legislation. The federal SAFE Bet Act from Blumenthal and Tonko pairs a credit card ban with an affordability check above USD$1,000 in 24 hours and a cap of five deposits a day. Section 1033, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) rule meant to give consumers a federal right to their own bank data, is currently enjoined and under reconsideration, which leaves the industry building on individual bank agreements rather than a settled federal standard.

The evidence base driving this is getting harder to argue with. The New York Fed’s analysis of consumer credit data found that after mobile sports betting legalisation, overall delinquency rose by roughly 0.3 percentage points, and among borrowers under 40, credit card delinquency rose by 1.02 points. Regulators read that research. Legislators quote it in committee.

Where this ends up is evidence. Operators will increasingly be asked to show why they believed a given player could afford a given level of spend, and to show it before the loss rather than after. Answering that from transaction data a player has already consented to share is far cheaper than bolting on a separate affordability check that nobody wants to complete.

Two moves worth making now

Firstly, treat the first deposit as the whole battle. The credit card exit concentrated disruption at precisely the moment a new player is least committed to your brand. Whichever method an operator makes easiest in that window, is the one most of that cohort will still be using in three years.

Secondly, decide what you want the deposit rail to tell you—before you choose it. If bank data is only ever a fraud check, almost any provider will do. If it feeds affordability, cohort segmentation and marketing suppression from day zero, the shortlist gets much shorter and the integration goes much deeper.

I believe that credit cards will be gone from US betting inside two years. What takes their place is being settled right now, mostly by default, mostly by whoever happens to already be integrated.

If your deposit rail is still built around cards and hope, that first-deposit window is where to start. Yaspa’s Intelligent Payments takes the deposit and the affordability signal off a single consented connection, and Guaranteed ACH means an operator can open that rail up properly rather than throttling it against return risk. Get in touch with the Yaspa team to talk through what that looks like on your stack.

Sources

• Ohio regulator proposes credit card ban, SBC Americas
• Ohio Casino Control Commission update, SBC Americas
• BetMGM credit card ban, SBC Americas
• Colorado House passes gambling bill, SBC Americas
• Analyst reaction to credit card bans, Gambling Insider
• State-by-state funding restrictions, Covers
• Evaluation of the credit card ban, NatCen
• Gambling using a credit card, UK Gambling Commission
• Open banking and the post-card-ban deposit shift, IBTimes UK
• Sports betting and credit reports, Liberty Street Economics (NY Fed)
• SAFE Bet Act coverage, Payments Dive
• Section 1033 enjoined and under reconsideration, Cozen O’Connor
• Open banking regulation in 2026, Consumer Finance Monitor

Note: card decline rate ranges are drawn from payments industry estimates rather than regulator-published data, and should be read as directional.