PSD2 and Open Banking

Open banking is a modern approach to provide better financial services and smooth payments. It introduces financial transparency, encourages innovation, and helps to manage your finances. Up to quite recently, only you and your chosen financial institutions, had all the information about your finances.

PSD2 broke this monopoly by regulating the sharing of financial information between financial institutions (banks, ewallets etc) and third-party operators. It enables bank transaction data to be shared via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), facilitating the transfer of data between these parties. Ideally, PSD2 should result in a better experience for consumers making everything better for the customer in a well organised and standardized way.

But for that, you need to grant access to your data to these operators. If you want to share your financial history with third-parties — it’s your call. But is it really your call?

How Does Open Banking and PSD2 Affect Smart Bettors?

You may recall receiving some emails from the financial institutions that you use about these new regulations, informing you that a couple processes will be updated. Unfortunately, the choices you were offered by some of them were ‘’take it or leave it’’. In simple words, you had to agree with the new Terms and Conditions or have your accounts closed. New accounts, must agree with PSD2 regulation upon registration.

A very experienced legal expert should examine if this is the tenor of the PSD2 regulation. Because if it is, then we are talking about a brutal and major attack on your rights. This attack contradicts to the whole GDPR regulation of the EU on data protection and privacy for all individual citizens of the European Union and the European Economic Area.

You may be perfectly fine with sharing your financial history with merchants and other operators. After all, PSD2 and Open Banking have a lot of advantages. But it’s different to share all that history with a number of bookmakers, especially if you’re a smart bettor. You’ve probably heard of player’s risk score before. Every minor detail about you, even age and gender, adds up to your risk score.

Perhaps you deposited a lot, maybe cleared a bonus, possibly practised some arbing or value betting, and then won a significant amount of money. All these could get you into trouble with bookmakers.

After all, almost all bookmakers have their T&Cs on their side. They reserve the right to restrict or suspend your account at any time and for any reason you could possibly imagine. They can consider your betting behaviour weird and suspect money laundering or fraud. Some bookmakers consider arbing as illegal.

While you argue with customer support and they do all kinds of verification checks and tricks, your well-deserved winnings are held, hostage. Just think about the psychological pressure of a situation like this.

Now imagine all these bookmakers, casinos and poker sites having near-real-time access to your information statement. This will allow gaming operators to screen all players automatically upon registration and have a better understanding of a customer’s profile and behaviour over time. To make a long story short, they will have a near perfection risk profile and persona of every customer.

To illustrate this situation better, imagine Bookmaker A seeing a client depositing 100 to bookmaker B and then withdrawing 800. What services do you think this client will receive from Bookmaker A? With PSD2, a Gaming Operator can see exactly what a customer deposits to or withdraws from other Operators, how much, when and how often.

How can you protect your self?

Before anything else, avoid giving your consent for third party access to your data. If this is not possible, as we have seen before, play a smoke and mirrors game, by building a profile that will make gaming operators happy. Pretend to be the silly loser they love to have as a client. Deposit your hard-earned cash to bookmakers in phases and not successively. Avoid withdrawing your winnings before you get restricted by most of them. Withdraw small balances first and bigger balances at the end.

Notice that PSD2 and Open Banking is a paradise for Big Data companies and other providers that will sell their services expensively to gaming operators. Keep in mind, that not all operators can afford this. Be sure that multibillion operators are using PSD2 from day 1, but smaller operators will struggle before they buy these services.

Stay informed and get educated before you start playing with Arbusers.

Really, did you find this kind of info anywhere else?