How the 11 June 2024 Credit Ban Turned PayID Into the Default Betting Deposit

I remember the week the credit card gambling ban took effect clearly. My inbox filled with two kinds of messages within about forty-eight hours. The first was from punters asking how they were supposed to fund accounts now. The second was from cashier teams at several operators asking what their incoming traffic shift looked like and whether their PayID infrastructure could handle the jump. Both groups got the same answer: the rail can handle it. It is already handling it. The question is whether you will.

The 11 June 2024 ban did not just remove one payment option. It repositioned the entire stack of deposit methods at Australian bookmakers, and PayID happened to be the rail that was both ready for the shift and structurally well-suited to absorb it. Understanding what the ban actually said and how it played out gives you a useful frame for everything happening in AU wagering payments right now.

What the ban actually says

The Interactive Gambling Amendment (Credit and Other Measures) Act 2023 banned the use of credit cards, credit-related products, and digital currency for wagering payments to Australian-licensed operators. The prohibition took effect on 11 June 2024. From that date, no licensed Australian wagering provider could accept credit-card payments, and no credit-card issuer could knowingly facilitate one.

The enforcement mechanism is direct. Licensed operators accepting prohibited payments face penalties of up to AU$247,500 per breach. This is not a slap-on-the-wrist regulatory hint. It is a commercial prohibition with teeth, and operators responded by building credit-card blocks into their cashiers in the weeks before the effective date.

The scope of the ban is worth understanding precisely. It covers credit cards – including those linked to digital wallets – and digital currencies. It does not cover debit cards, which remain a legal deposit method at licensed operators. It does not cover bank transfers, PayID, POLi-equivalent services, or any other non-credit payment method. And it does not cover physical cash deposits in face-to-face venues, which are regulated under different state frameworks.

One specific wrinkle punters run into: a credit card linked to a digital wallet like Apple Pay or Google Pay is still a credit card for the purposes of the ban. The payment service does not launder the underlying credit instrument. An attempt to fund a bookmaker through a credit-card-backed digital wallet will be rejected just as a direct credit-card payment would be.

The ban applies to Australian-licensed operators. It does not extend its enforcement reach to offshore unlicensed operators, which has created a regulatory asymmetry that I have covered in the analysis of offshore PayID betting risk. Some offshore operators continue to accept credit-card deposits, which is one of the ways they compete against the licensed market. It is also one of the warning signs that an operator is not licensed in Australia.

Who was affected, in numbers

The ban affected fewer punters than the policy conversation suggested. Research from the e61 Institute found that only around 2% of credit-card users in Australia had ever used their card for online wagering. The population directly hit by the prohibition was small as a share of credit-card holders overall.

What that small share concealed, though, was a disproportionate share of high-risk punting behaviour. Credit-card gambling was not evenly distributed across bettors. It was concentrated in patterns that correlated with gambling harm – impulsive deposits during sessions, funding beyond available cash balances, and chasing losses with borrowed money. The 2% of credit-card users who used the cards for wagering were not a random sample of bettors. They were, disproportionately, the bettors for whom credit-card access was actively harmful.

That concentration is why the ban’s advocates argued it would have outsized effects relative to the small share of users directly affected. Removing credit from the deposit stack was expected to reduce exactly the behaviour that was most harmful, rather than just shifting deposit choice across the broader bettor population.

The sector’s macro context matters here. Australians wagered AU$244.3 billion in the 2022-23 financial year and lost AU$31.5 billion, averaging about AU$1,527 per adult. Online wagering specifically grew 165.7% in turnover during that same period to AU$75.4 billion, representing 31% of total national gambling turnover. The ban landed on a market that was large, growing fast, and increasingly digital. A payment-method change aimed specifically at the smaller sub-segment of highest-risk users could move meaningful numbers without disrupting the bulk of the market.

The behaviour change actually observed

The post-ban data has been revealing. The e61 Institute’s follow-up study found that average fortnightly spending by affected users dropped by around AU$50 in the six weeks following the ban. About a third of the affected cohort stopped wagering entirely in that initial window, and the overall likelihood of wagering on any given day fell by around 15% among previously active credit-card bettors.

Those numbers are meaningful. A AU$50-per-fortnight reduction on a cohort spending materially above that level is a real change, and a one-third complete cessation in the first six weeks is a substantial behavioural shift. The research team’s summary captured the finding plainly: “Maitra and Maltman said the credit-card ban demonstrated that gambling behavior is responsive to policy, especially when frictions disrupt impulsive betting. But they added that greater reductions in gambling harm may require targeting sectors where risks are more concentrated. Policymakers seeking to reduce harm may achieve greater impact by focusing on poker machines.”

The caveat in that summary is worth attending to. The credit ban worked, but its effect was concentrated in a specific deposit pathway, and the broader gambling-harm picture includes venues and products the ban did not touch. For online wagering specifically, the ban achieved its narrow goal. For the total gambling-harm landscape, it was one lever among many.

What the data does not fully capture is the substitution effect. Some percentage of affected bettors did not stop wagering but simply shifted to other deposit methods – debit cards, PayID, and in some cases offshore operators who still accept credit cards. Measuring substitution is harder than measuring total spending change, and the long-run picture of where displaced credit-card volume went is still emerging.

Why PayID picked up the share

When credit cards exited the deposit mix at licensed operators on 11 June 2024, the question was what would replace them in the cashier stack. Debit cards were still available but not structurally cheaper or more convenient than they had been before. Bank transfer was still slow. BPAY was still batch-based. PayID was already sitting in the cashier at most major operators and was the one method that felt like a direct like-for-like replacement for credit-card convenience.

The timing was favourable. PayID adoption had been scaling steadily through 2022 and 2023, reaching more than 25 million registrations by early 2025 and crossing 27 million by mid-2025. Almost half of registered users were transacting via the rail at least weekly by that point. The consumer familiarity with PayID had reached the level where it could absorb a sudden increase in use without friction.

The rail’s economics sealed the shift. With the NPP wholesale transaction cost down to around AU$0.04 from AU$0.39 in 2019, operators could absorb the entire per-transaction cost without needing to surcharge punters. The free-to-punter experience, the near-instant settlement, and the familiar bank-app flow meant that credit-card users who would have found any other replacement frustrating generally found PayID acceptable.

Operator analytics teams I have spoken with describe the shift clearly. In the quarters before the ban, PayID sat at roughly a third of incoming deposits at most major bookmakers, with debit cards taking the largest share. In the quarters after, PayID rose toward half or more of incoming deposits at many operators, with debit cards still present but no longer the dominant method. Credit cards went from a meaningful minority share to zero within the quarter the ban took effect.

This shift is the reason PayID has become the assumed default for betting deposits in Australia. It was not a natural market outcome driven purely by consumer preference. It was a market outcome catalysed by a regulatory change, and the resulting position is stable because the underlying economics support it. As long as the rail remains cheap for operators and frictionless for punters, PayID will continue to be the default deposit rail regardless of whether any further policy changes reshape the stack further.

The broader regulatory trajectory continues to move in similar directions. The Point-of-Consumption Tax framework shapes the economics of licensed operators. The 2027 advertising reform will further reshape acquisition dynamics. I cover how POCT interacts with the PayID rail in a separate analysis for anyone interested in the public-revenue side of the picture.