Trustly vs Nuvei: Open Banking Payments for iGaming Operators in 2026

Open banking has stopped being a Nordic curiosity and become the default deposit rail for regulated iGaming. Account-to-account transfers skip the card networks entirely, cut chargeback exposure, and convert at rates cards can't match once a player's bank is already connected to the checkout. Two names dominate the conversation for operators building or rebuilding a payment stack around this shift: Trustly, the company that effectively created Pay by Bank as an iGaming category, and Nuvei, the broader payment orchestration platform that added open banking as one rail among many.

They get compared constantly because they solve adjacent problems, but the overlap is smaller than the marketing suggests. This piece breaks down where each one actually wins for operators evaluating open banking payments in 2026.

Quick verdict

If the bulk of an operator's volume sits in Europe — particularly the Nordics, UK, Baltics, and DACH region — Trustly is the more mature, deeper-penetrated rail, with Pay N Play as a genuine product differentiator rather than a marketing label. If an operator needs a single processor to handle cards, local acquiring, payouts, and open banking across US states and multiple continents, Nuvei's broader stack removes the need to bolt a specialist onto an existing card processor. Most large multi-market operators end up running both, routing each region to whichever rail converts best there.

Trustly vs Nuvei at a glance

Trustly: the deposit-page default in regulated Europe

Trustly built its business on a simple idea: let a player authenticate with their bank and deposit in seconds, with no card details, no e-wallet top-up, and no waiting for a transfer to clear. That idea became Pay N Play, which bundles account creation, KYC, and first deposit into a single bank authentication step. For operators, that's a direct hit on signup friction — a player who would otherwise abandon a lengthy registration form can be playing within a minute.

The depth of Trustly's European coverage is the real moat. Sweden leads through BankID authentication, which makes deposits close to frictionless for the market Trustly was built in. Finland, Denmark, and Norway follow closely behind. Germany has grown sharply as open banking adoption increased, the Netherlands converts well because Dutch consumers are already used to bank-based payments through iDEAL, and the UK gained real depth after Trustly's acquisition of Ecospend. Trustly's rails now sit on the deposit page of most major European operators, including Bet365, Flutter Entertainment, Entain, and Kindred — which says as much about market standardization as it does about Trustly's own sales effort.

The tradeoff is scope. Trustly does one thing — bank-to-bank transfers — and doesn't process cards, e-wallets, or other local methods. An operator using Trustly as their sole processor still needs a separate stack for card payments, and Trustly's licensing bar (a minimum of a Curaçao GCB license for gaming merchants) reflects that it's built for regulated gaming specifically rather than general commerce. Trustly is also lighter outside its core European footprint; operators expanding into the US or APAC will find Nuvei-style coverage more useful there.

Nuvei: one processor across cards, local acquiring, and open banking

Nuvei's pitch is consolidation. Rather than stitching together a card processor, a payout provider, and an open banking specialist, operators route deposits and withdrawals through one platform that handles all three. Nuvei's Instant Bank Transfer product covers the open banking use case directly, while local acquiring in 52 markets across Europe, LATAM, North America, and Asia-Pacific handles the rest.

The approval-rate numbers are where Nuvei leans hardest into its pitch: published iGaming approval rates of 87–94%, rising toward 96% when smart routing selects the local acquirer most likely to approve a given card. For high-volume operators, a few points of approval-rate improvement compounds into meaningful revenue that a single-rail specialist can't offer on its own, because approval rate is a card-acquiring metric, not an open banking one.

Nuvei's other differentiator is US regulatory reach. The company has been approved to process sports betting and iGaming payments in Michigan, received sportsbook approval in New York, and expanded into Colorado and Indiana, building toward what it describes as state gaming vendor registrations across six US states. For operators scaling in the patchwork of US state-by-state licensing, that's a meaningfully different proposition than a Europe-first specialist. Settlement is slower than Trustly's near-instant model — Nuvei quotes T+2 to T+7 to the operator's account, though this is negotiable at higher volumes — which is the natural tradeoff for a platform juggling cards, local methods, and bank rails rather than optimizing one flow end to end.

Nuvei's scale ambitions extend beyond payment processing itself: in June 2026 the company announced a definitive agreement to acquire Payoneer for approximately $2.75 billion in total transaction equity value, a move that signals Nuvei is building out cross-border payout infrastructure well beyond its gaming vertical.

What this means for operators building a 2026 payment stack

Neither platform is trying to be a drop-in replacement for the other, and treating this as a straight head-to-head misses the point. The real decision is about stack architecture:

• Europe-heavy operators get more conversion lift from Trustly's Pay N Play flow than from adding open banking as a line item inside a broader processor. The instant-onboarding effect is the product, not just the payment rail.
• Multi-region operators, especially those with US ambitions, benefit from Nuvei's single-integration model across cards, local acquiring, and bank transfers — one vendor relationship instead of three, and one vendor already carrying state gaming approvals.
• Operators already running a card processor who want to add open banking as a supplementary deposit method, rather than restructure their entire payment flow, will find Trustly the lower-friction addition since it doesn't require migrating existing card volume.

In practice, the most common setup among large multi-market operators isn't a choice between the two — it's Trustly on the European deposit page where it dominates, and Nuvei (or a comparable orchestration platform) handling cards, payouts, and US state-regulated flows everywhere else.

FAQ

Does Trustly support card payments? No. Trustly is a bank-transfer-only rail. Operators need a separate processor for card acceptance, which is why Trustly is typically deployed alongside another payment provider rather than as a standalone stack.

Can Nuvei fully replace a dedicated open banking specialist like Trustly in Europe? Nuvei's Instant Bank Transfer product covers the open banking use case, but Trustly's depth in specific markets — particularly Sweden, Finland, and the UK — comes from years of bank integrations and the Pay N Play onboarding flow. Operators prioritizing conversion in those specific markets generally still route through Trustly there.

What licensing do operators need to work with either provider? Trustly requires at minimum a Curaçao GCB license for gaming merchants. Nuvei's requirements follow standard payment-processor due diligence plus state-level gaming vendor registration in the US markets where it's approved, such as Michigan, New York, Colorado, and Indiana.

Which one settles funds to the operator faster? Trustly's bank-transfer model is typically near-instant to next-day. Nuvei quotes T+2 to T+7 for settlement to the operator account, though this window can be negotiated down at higher transaction volumes.

Bottom line

Trustly and Nuvei aren't fighting for the same budget line. Trustly is the sharper tool for maximizing conversion on the European deposit page; Nuvei is the broader platform for operators who'd rather manage one payment relationship across cards, payouts, and multiple regulated US states. The operators getting the most out of 2026's open banking wave aren't picking one — they're routing volume to whichever rail fits each market, and increasingly that means both.