Bank Transfer at Richroyal: The SEPA Route in Practice

The plain bank transfer is the least fashionable route in any cashier and, for a certain kind of reader, the most sensible one. It moves money between two named accounts inside the Single Euro Payments Area with no card scheme, no wallet and no intermediary taking a cut, and it leaves a clean record on both sides. It is also the slowest option on offer and the one where a single careless field can cost several days. This page describes how the route behaves at the Richroyal platform and where German gambling law would otherwise have intervened.

Numbers and timings on this route

Everything in that table is measured in Bankarbeitstage. Weekends and Feiertage are not counted, which is why a Friday release regularly lands on the following Tuesday. Instant SEPA has changed expectations across German banking generally, but a gambling cashier reconciles incoming payments in batches, so the credit still depends on the operator processing cycle rather than on the speed of the rail alone.

The reference field decides everything

A bank transfer carries no session and no login; the only link between an incoming payment and a particular gambling account is the reference string the cashier generates. Sent exactly as displayed, the payment is matched automatically. Sent with a word added, a digit dropped or a helpful description substituted, it drops into a manual queue where a person has to identify it, and that takes days rather than minutes. The same applies to the sending account: it has to belong to the person named on the profile, because European anti-money-laundering law forbids crediting third-party money to someone else account. A transfer from a partner or a parent will be returned, and the account will be reviewed while that happens.

Why some German banks refuse to send it

Card refusals are the familiar problem, but transfers are refused too, though less often. A number of German institutions screen outgoing payments to recipients they classify as gambling operators, particularly where the recipient sits outside the whitelist maintained by the Gemeinsame Glücksspielbehörde der Länder. The payment then bounces back a day or two later with a terse note. There is no technical workaround at the cashier end; the alternatives are Trustly, which authorises through the same online banking login but presents differently, a wallet such as Skrill, or a crypto route for readers who accept its own drawbacks.

What the German permit system would add to this transfer

The Glücksspielstaatsvertrag that took effect on 1 July 2021 created a nationwide permission for virtual slot machines and wrapped it in obligations that a bank transfer to a whitelisted anbieter would trigger automatically. LUGAS would check the payment against a shared monthly ceiling of 1.000 € across every German-licensed platform combined and refuse anything above it without a documented affordability assessment. The account would be visible to OASIS, the nationwide exclusion register kept by the Regierungspräsidium Darmstadt, where a self-block runs for a minimum of three months and covers casinos, arcades and bookmakers at once. The games themselves would be capped at a 1 € stake per spin with a five-second rhythm, no autoplay and no jackpots, and a panic button would end a session for 24 hours. The state would collect 5,3 percent of every stake in tax. Richroyal is licensed elsewhere in the European Union and appears on none of that infrastructure, so a SEPA transfer to it is an ordinary payment to a foreign business with no German limit check behind it.

When this route is the right choice

SEPA suits larger amounts, readers who want a complete and unambiguous paper trail, and anyone whose card is blocked by the issuer. It suits nobody who wants to play within the next hour. The practical discipline is to send once rather than in several tranches, to copy the reference precisely, to keep the bank confirmation with its end-to-end identifier so support can trace a specific payment, and to finish the identity check before the first withdrawal is requested. Anyone who notices that they are transferring money faster than their own budgeting allows should look at the BZgA programme Spielen mit Verantwortung and its Check dein Spiel self-test, or at a Suchtberatungsstelle in their Bundesland, and at the tools listed on the self-exclusion page.

Questions and answers

Related: Trustly, the faster bank route · paysafecard and its return path · all routes

Author: Malte Brenninger, editor for gambling regulation and payments. 18+.