Trustly at Richroyal: Paying Straight from a German Bank Account

Trustly is the route most German readers end up using once a card has been refused, and the reason is structural rather than promotional. It does not travel on the card network at all. Instead it uses the open banking framework created by the second European Payment Services Directive, which obliges banks to let a licensed payment institution initiate a transfer on the account holder instruction. The practical consequence is a payment that behaves like a normal bank transfer to the bank and like an instant deposit to the cashier. This page sets out how that works at the Richroyal platform and where the German gambling framework sits around it.

How the payment is actually executed

Selecting Trustly in the cashier opens a list of supported institutions. Choosing one loads the bank own login screen, where the credentials and the second factor are entered exactly as they would be in the banking app. The bank authorises a single payment for a single amount, and Trustly forwards a confirmation to the operator immediately. The balance is credited against that confirmation, which is why the money is playable within seconds even though the funds themselves settle later on the ordinary SEPA schedule. No card number is involved, no data is stored on the gambling site, and the credentials are never visible to the operator.

The numbers on this route

Because the money leaves and returns through the same named account, the ownership requirement is satisfied by construction. That removes the most common cause of a stalled first payout, which is a mismatch between the name on the payment instrument and the name on the profile. Identity documents are still required, since the obligation belongs to the operator under European anti-money-laundering law and no payment route exempts anyone from it.

Where Trustly succeeds and a card fails

German issuers block merchant category 7995 widely, and that block applies to Visa and Mastercard alike. An open banking payment is not tagged with a merchant category in the same way, so it usually goes through even at institutions that refuse cards outright. That is a description of how the plumbing works, not a recommendation to circumvent a bank policy: a reader whose bank blocks gambling deliberately, or who once asked for that block themselves, should treat the refusal as the boundary it was meant to be.

What Trustly does not do

It does not make a platform German-licensed. The Glücksspielstaatsvertrag of 2021 permits virtual slot machines nationwide only under conditions that are checked at the operator level: a maximum stake of 1 € per spin, at least five seconds between spins, no autoplay, no jackpots, a panic button that suspends an account for 24 hours, mandatory participation in LUGAS with its shared monthly deposit ceiling of 1.000 € across all German platforms and its ban on parallel sessions, and a live connection to OASIS, the nationwide exclusion register operated by the Regierungspräsidium Darmstadt, where a self-block lasts at least three months. Compliance with all of that is what earns a place on the whitelist published by the Gemeinsame Glücksspielbehörde der Länder in Halle an der Saale. Richroyal holds a licence from a different EU jurisdiction and is not on that list, so a Trustly payment there passes no shared limit file. The only ceilings that exist are the ones a reader sets manually in the account and the ones described on the self-exclusion page.

Sensible use of the route

Set a deposit limit before the first payment rather than after the third, because a route this frictionless removes the pause that a slow method used to provide. Fund and withdraw through the same account, which keeps every payout automatic. Keep the bank booking, since its end-to-end identifier is what support needs to trace a single transfer, and support is reachable by chat and email around the clock in German. And treat the speed as what it is: a convenience for the reader and, at the same time, the removal of the last natural delay between deciding to play and playing. The BZgA campaign Spielen mit Verantwortung, its Check dein Spiel self-test and the Suchtberatungsstellen of the Bundesländer are the neutral places to look if that speed starts to matter.

Questions and answers

Related: the manual SEPA route · Skrill as a wallet alternative · all routes

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