2027 Gambling Advertising Reform: The Knock-On Effects on PayID Deposits

The first time I read the Murphy Review’s final recommendations on gambling advertising, I noticed something about the sector’s public response that told me more than the recommendations themselves did. The operators did not fight the underlying concept. They fought the specifics. That signals a market that has accepted advertising reform is coming and is now positioning itself for the post-reform landscape rather than trying to prevent it.

The 2027 advertising reform will reshape how Australian bookmakers acquire customers. That reshaping has consequences for everything downstream, including how operators think about deposit rails. PayID is already the cashier default. The advertising changes will push it further toward being a strategic asset rather than just a convenient rail. Here is how I see the chain of effects playing out.

What is actually changing in 2027

The gambling advertising reform that is expected to take substantive effect in 2027 builds on recommendations from the Murphy Review and subsequent government responses. The broad direction is toward tighter restrictions on when, where, and how gambling can be advertised in Australia.

Core elements of the reform package that are widely expected include a phased ban on gambling advertising during live sport broadcasts, tighter restrictions on advertising in programming directed at or accessible to minors, limits on celebrity endorsements in gambling advertising, and restrictions on digital advertising through platforms where age-verification cannot be reliably enforced. Specific implementation details are still being worked through, and some elements may shift during legislative drafting.

The policy logic is straightforward. Australia has one of the largest per-capita gambling expenditures in the world, averaging around AU$1,527 per adult annually as of the 2022-23 financial year. Gambling advertising during sport broadcasts in particular has been shown to influence impulsive betting decisions and normalise wagering behaviour among audiences that include children. The reform is aimed at reducing both effects.

The commercial context for operators is that Australia’s online gambling market is valued at around AU$6.13 billion in 2025 with projections toward AU$13.10 billion by 2035. The sports betting sector specifically is worth around AU$6.81 billion in 2024 and projected to grow at 22% compound annually through the remainder of the decade. Operators are trying to capture growth in a market that is simultaneously being subjected to increasing advertising restrictions. The tension between growth pressure and advertising limitation is what shapes how operators will respond.

The reform will not ban gambling advertising outright. It will tighten the rules around when and how it can appear, and shift the balance of acquisition marketing toward channels and formats that the new rules still allow. Expect more focus on direct response through search and in-app, more emphasis on sponsorship that sits below the advertising-restriction threshold, and more investment in retaining existing customers rather than constantly acquiring new ones.

Bookmaker acquisition pressure after the reform

The acquisition cost per customer for Australian bookmakers is going to rise. Restricting the highest-volume advertising channels without introducing a replacement of equivalent reach inevitably pushes the remaining channels more expensive. Operators who previously paid to reach mass audiences during live sport will be paying similar or higher amounts to reach smaller audiences through alternative channels.

The commercial response I expect is a sharper focus on conversion efficiency at every point of the acquisition funnel. If you are spending more to get a potential customer’s attention, you cannot afford to lose that customer to friction once they arrive at your site. Every step of the signup and first-deposit experience will be scrutinised for friction removal. This is where PayID becomes more strategic for operators than it was already.

Compare the first-deposit experience across payment methods. A debit card deposit requires the punter to enter a card number, expiry, CVC, billing address verification, and sometimes 3D Secure authentication. Each of those steps is a friction point where a share of potential customers abandon. A PayID deposit requires the punter to jump to their banking app, authenticate there, confirm a pre-populated payment, and return. Fewer steps, fewer abandonment points, faster completion. The conversion rate on PayID-primary cashier flows is demonstrably higher than on card-primary flows.

In a post-reform world where acquisition cost per successful first deposit is higher, the cashier with the best conversion rate has a real commercial advantage. Operators who have built their cashiers around PayID will find the rail’s friction profile paying off more visibly. Operators who have lagged on PayID integration will have incentive to catch up.

The RWA CEO has been explicit about the commercial stakes: if the licensed market’s products and pricing do not remain competitive, punters will move to offshore alternatives. The advertising reform creates exactly this kind of commercial pressure, and the cost-efficient deposit rails that let licensed operators maintain competitiveness become genuinely strategic.

Why the PayID rail gets more strategic

Three specific shifts in operator behaviour are likely to play out through 2027 and beyond, each of which reinforces PayID’s position.

The first is deeper investment in cashier UX around PayID. If PayID is the primary acquisition rail, it is worth putting more engineering effort into making the flow feel polished end to end. Expect more personalisation, better error handling, faster reconciliation, and smoother bank-app handoffs. The operators who have already made these investments are the ones I expect to be best positioned after the reform.

The second is broader adoption of PayID withdrawals. Today only a handful of licensed operators pay out on the NPP rail. After the advertising reform, the payout experience becomes a more visible competitive differentiator because acquiring new customers is harder, which makes retaining existing customers more valuable, which makes the quality of the payout experience more important. I would expect several more operators to move toward PayID payouts through 2027 and 2028 as a retention tool.

The third is tighter integration of PayID with operator loyalty and retention programmes. If the cashier is the primary friction-reduction asset, operators will build loyalty programmes that work through the cashier – seamless rollover balances, in-cashier notifications about personalised offers, instant reward credits on deposits. PayID’s settlement speed makes all of this easier than it would be on a slower rail.

The NPP infrastructure can handle whatever volume increase comes from all this. More than 155 million real-time transactions already cross the rail every month, and the system is architected to scale further. Capacity is not the constraint. Operator investment in the cashier layer on top of the rail is the constraint, and the advertising reform will sharpen the incentive to make those investments.

I cover the specific economics of the RBA’s interchange consultation and why PayID remains cheaper than cards in a separate piece. The combination of RBA-driven interchange reform, the 2027 advertising reform, and continued growth in online wagering all push in the same direction: PayID stays cheap, stays fast, stays dominant.

The possible offshore spillover

The harder question the advertising reform raises is what happens to the offshore market during and after the transition. Every policy change that makes the licensed market more restrictive without equivalently constraining unlicensed alternatives risks pushing some share of activity offshore.

The offshore market in Australia was already sitting at around AU$3.9 billion in revenue in 2025 – roughly 36% of total online gambling activity – with projections toward AU$5 billion by 2029. This is a significant base for any further spillover to build on. If the advertising reform inadvertently accelerates offshore growth even slightly, the absolute numbers involved become painful quickly.

The mechanism for spillover would be straightforward. Restricted advertising reduces the visibility of licensed operators in the public consciousness. Punters who would previously have stumbled across a licensed brand through TV advertising may end up reaching for search instead, and search results often surface offshore operators alongside licensed ones. A punter who does not specifically know which operators are licensed and which are not is less likely to verify the distinction if the licensed market is no longer constantly signalling its presence through advertising.

The risk is acknowledged in industry conversations even if rarely discussed publicly. The RWA CEO has pointed to the offshore market’s 2.5x growth rate relative to the regulated market, and the acquisition dynamics after the advertising reform will not make that differential easier to close. If anything, the reform could accelerate it, unless complementary measures like tightened enforcement and better consumer education are introduced alongside.

For the individual bettor, the practical implication of all this is worth keeping in mind. Post-reform, it will matter more than ever to verify that any operator you deposit with is licensed. The payee-name check on every PayID deposit becomes the last line of defence when other signals – advertising presence, brand familiarity – are no longer as available. Around one in four PayID users already aborts a payment at the name-match step when something looks off. That habit will need to do more work after 2027 than it does today.

The advertising reform is, in the end, a policy choice the sector is adapting to rather than fighting. The operators who adapt well – who invest in cashier UX, who build retention rather than constant acquisition, who use PayID as a strategic asset rather than just a rail – will come out the other side of 2027 in better commercial health. The operators who do not will lose share. And the offshore market will keep being a shadow the licensed sector has to manage carefully regardless.