sports betting with trustly in new zealand — what really changes in 2026

Updated October 2026

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Trustly’s name keeps surfacing alongside sportsbooks because it built its reputation on letting punters move money straight from a bank account without a card. The interesting question is what that promise is worth on this side of the Tasman, where the law has just narrowed the legal field to one operator group and left the rest of the brands readers meet in offshore waters. The marketing answer is that Trustly is everywhere; the realistic answer for a New Zealand punter is shorter and more pointed.

The data below is current as of October 30, 2026 and was checked against the Racing Industry Act 2020 (section 74AAA, in force 28 June 2025) and the Department of Internal Affairs’s public statements on online sports and racing betting.

The legal shape of betting in New Zealand

New Zealand did not always look like this. Until mid-2025 a stack of overseas sportsbooks took Kiwi punters openly, and the question “which site accepts Trustly” was the practical one. The Racing Industry Amendment Act 2025 closed that off.

Section 74AAA of the Racing Industry Act 2020, in force from 28 June 2025, says that no person other than TAB NZ may offer racing betting, sports betting or other racing or sports betting to a person in New Zealand, regardless of where that person is resident or incorporated. The Department of Internal Affairs wrote to offshore providers serving New Zealand and told them to withdraw with immediate effect. The point of consumption is what matters — a bookmaker sitting in Malta or Curaçao that takes a bet from someone in Auckland is the operator the law is aimed at.

There is no licence to apply for, no application fee and no licence register of bookmakers, because there is only one lawful operator. A “licensed” offshore brand is licensed somewhere else, not here. The DIA’s standing warning is that overseas operators may be in jurisdictions with minimal consumer safeguards, may not return unspent credits and may not pay out large wins.

TAB NZ runs the betting side through a 25-year partnership signed with Entain in 2023. Entain operates the business and shares gross profits 50/50, with at least $150 million a year going to TAB NZ for the first five years and a one-off $100 million payment pledged to the racing sector. Betcha is the second online brand of the same TAB NZ group, not a rival — describing them as competitors misreads the structure.

The Online Casino Gambling Act 2026 is a separate statute. It regulates online casino gambling and does not extend the betting monopoly. A casino licence does not let an operator take a sports bet.

What a New Zealand punter may and may not bet on

Racing and sports betting from TAB NZ only. TAB NZ takes fixed-odds and tote (parimutuel/pool) bets. Published betting rules define Win, Place, Each Way, Quinella, Exacta, Trifecta, First Four, Double, Treble, Daily Double, Running Double, Quaddie and Big6, plus Multis and Same Game Multis where the legs come from one match. Live betting is listed inside the TAB NZ apps. There is no New Zealand betting exchange and no spread betting under TAB NZ’s sports definition; greyhound racing is closing in stages from 1 August 2026, and offshore operators may not take bets on those races from that date either.

The ban covers events held inside and outside New Zealand. Whether esports betting counts as “sports betting” under the Racing Industry Act has not been settled in writing; virtual (computer-simulated) sport is treated as casino gambling under the 2026 online casino law. Bets on politics and novelty markets are not addressed in the materials the regulator publishes.

Tax, levies and what a player actually owes

Recreational gambling winnings are generally not taxable in New Zealand, and prize money from TAB horse, dog and trotting races is not taxable. A person betting as a business is a different case and must consult Inland Revenue or an accountant. On the operator side, TAB NZ pays a Problem Gambling Levy of 0.74%, in force from 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2028. Offshore operators supplying New Zealand residents pay online gambling duty — 12% of profits from 1 July 2024, rising to 16% from 1 January 2027 — but paying duty in some jurisdiction is not a licence to take bets here.

Enforcement and the player

Section 19(4) of the Gambling Act 2003, inserted in 2025, says an individual cannot be convicted for placing a bet with an offshore operator that is in breach of section 74AAA. No penalty for a player has been published. New Zealand does not block bookmaker websites; the obligation sits on the operator. The honest framing is that TAB NZ and Betcha are the lawful options with New Zealand harm-minimisation tools, regulator oversight and a complaints route, while offshore brands are unlawful for the operator to serve New Zealand, have no New Zealand complaint channel, and carry the risks DIA names in its warning.

Safer gambling tools and where help lives

Safer gambling is built into the lawful product because the law requires it. TAB NZ’s apps list deposit limits, time-outs and self-exclusion as in-app tools, and a self-exclusion applies across both TAB and Betcha. The exclusion is operator-scoped — turning off a TAB account does not turn off a different offshore account the punter might also hold.

The age for TAB NZ betting is 18, and betting under 18 is an offence under section 89 of the Racing Industry Act 2020. Land-based casinos in New Zealand admit from 20; the two ages are not the same and must not be merged. Opening a TAB NZ account requires a verified New Zealand address and ID, which is the same friction the offshore brands avoid by skipping verification, and one of the things that distinguishes them at the cashier.

The free helpline is 0800 654 655, with text support on 8006. Safer Gambling Aotearoa is the public-facing name for the harm-minimisation work funded by the Problem Gambling Levy. There is no single national online-betting exclusion register; the register the online casino law will create is for online casinos only.

The offshore brands have their own safer-gambling pages. Reading them is worth doing before opening an account, because the standards they enforce are their own, not New Zealand’s, and the complaint route is theirs, not DIA’s.

How Trustly works at the cashier — and why it matters less in NZ than elsewhere

Trustly is a Swedish fintech that lets a customer pay directly from a bank account without a card. It was founded in 2008 in Stockholm, originally as Glue Finance, by Carl Wilson, Joel Jakobsson and Lukas Gratte. The company launched Pay N Play in 2016, which is the version aimed at gambling: pay, play, verify identity from the bank login, no separate registration form. Trustly is supervised as a licensed payment institution by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority in the EU/EEA and by the UK Financial Conduct Authority, and the company reports connections to about 12,000 banks, 650 million consumers and over 9,000 companies. The number that matters in 2026 is the regulatory one: in February 2022 the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority issued Trustly a formal warning and a SEK 130 million fine over anti-money-laundering deficiencies, which is the kind of line in a CV that explains why a payment page is slower and more curious than it used to be.

What Trustly does at the betting cashier

A Trustly deposit lands in the sportsbook account in seconds, because the money moves through the bank’s own open-banking rails rather than through a card scheme. The customer does not enter card numbers, and the merchant never holds them. Withdrawals use the same rails in reverse — the sportsbook tells Trustly to send the money back to the same bank account, and the money usually arrives the same day, faster than a card refund and without the 1–3 banking days a Visa or Mastercard payout can take.

The trade-off is verification. Pay N Play’s selling point is identity from the bank login, which is convenient and adequate in jurisdictions that treat bank verification as full identification. New Zealand’s TAB NZ still asks for a New Zealand address and ID on file, which is its own requirement, and that requirement is one of the operational reasons an offshore site that takes Trustly ends up doing its own KYC on top.

Minimums, fees and speed

Trustly itself does not publish a uniform minimum deposit across all sportsbooks — each operator sets its own floor, usually between $10 and $20 in the equivalent currency. The fee the punter sees is typically zero, because Trustly’s pricing is to the merchant. The fee that does bite is currency conversion: a Trustly deposit in euros into a New Zealand-dollar account runs through the punter’s bank’s FX margin, and a $10 deposit becomes a $9.70 deposit once the bank’s slice is taken.

Why the Trustly angle lands softly in New Zealand

The question “which betting sites take Trustly” is a real question in jurisdictions where dozens of brands compete and the payment method decides where the punter goes. In New Zealand it is mostly an academic question, because the lawful field has narrowed to one operator group, and that group publishes its own deposit methods on its own terms. The brand comparison in the next section is thus a comparison of brands readers will meet if they go looking, not a comparison of brands the law invites them to use. Reading it that way is what the rest of the page is for.

The two NZ-licensed brands, head to head

TAB and Betcha are the two online brands of TAB NZ, the only provider lawfully offering racing and sports betting to people in New Zealand since 28 June 2025. They are one operator group run with Entain, never rivals. The table below is what they are, not how they stack against each other.

TAB

TAB is the original brand and the one New Zealanders have bet with for decades. It carries the full racing product — thoroughbred, harness and greyhound (closing in stages from 1 August 2026) — together with fixed-odds sports and the tote/pool products. The app adds Trackside live race streaming with in-app betting, racing form, Blackbook and Jockey Challenge tools, and a simplified wallet for deposits and withdrawals. Safer-gambling tools inside the app are deposit limits, time-outs and self-exclusion. The 0800 654 655 helpline and 8006 text line are listed in the app and on the website.

Betcha

Betcha is the second TAB NZ brand, aimed at a younger and more sports-leaning punter. It runs on the same TAB NZ account, the same New Zealand wallet and the same self-exclusion; opening a Betcha account does not give a second self-exclusion route. Betcha carries fixed-odds sports and the racing product, with a faster bet-slip and a sportsbook-first layout. Marketing for Betcha leans on boosted odds and same-game multis on the headline codes — Super Rugby Pacific, NRL, the All Blacks test window, the Black Caps summer.

Where the choice between TAB and Betcha actually lives

Both brands share the same TAB NZ account, the same wallet and the same harm-minimisation tools, so a punter picking between them is choosing a presentation rather than a product. TAB is the deeper racing experience, with form, Blackbook and pool betting surfaced first; Betcha is the cleaner sportsbook with the bet-slip and the boosted-odds cards closer to the front. A punter who lives on quinellas, trifectas and First Fours stays on TAB; a punter whose week is built around the All Blacks, the Warriors, the NRL and the Melbourne Cup markets and who wants the boosted card one tap away stays on Betcha. Both brands will pay out a winning bet into the same TAB NZ wallet, which is the practical answer to the “which one” question.

Operators readers meet offshore, and what they actually offer

The table is a landscape, not a ranking. The first two rows are the lawful New Zealand field; the rest are brands a New Zealand reader will meet online, with the operator’s own terms in their own words. Calling any of them “licensed in New Zealand” is wrong. A punter who wants a New Zealand account, a New Zealand complaint route and the helpline on the same page goes to TAB or Betcha. A punter who wants the breadth of markets, the boosted-odds cards and the bonus structures listed in the right-hand column opens an offshore account knowing the operator is breaking New Zealand law by taking the bet and that the safeguards are the operator’s own.

What each offshore brand is actually for

Golden Panda is a casino-first site with a sports section bolted on — sportsbook, esports and virtual sports sit alongside live casino, crash games and a VIP Club. A punter picking it is picking the casino rewards path with sports on the side.

Spinbara runs parallel casino and sports welcome packages — a 100% first-deposit sports bonus up to EUR 100, a sport crypto welcome of 100% up to 200 USDT, and a casino welcome of 100% up to EUR 500 plus 200 free spins. The crypto welcome is the headline.

Winz.io is a crypto-only cashier with no stated deposit limits and instant withdrawals on the site’s own terms. The trade-off is that crypto deposits are not reversible and the wallet is the punter’s, which is the cost of bypassing the card rails.

Millioner is a softer statement — e-wallet deposits and payouts are fast and cards are slow because a bank processes them. Read it as an operator that prefers the punter use an e-wallet and is happy to say so.

Rabona is part of the Soft2Bet group, launched 23 December 2019. The brand is one of six sportsbooks the group runs in parallel; the product is the group’s standard sportsbook, not a custom build.

Betninja is a small sportsbook with a casino welcome of EUR 1,000 plus 100 free spins and a sports first-deposit match of 100% up to EUR 100. The shape is a typical small brand — a sports bonus and a casino welcome on the same account.

Roobet operates under a Curaçao licence (OGL/2024/687/0427), with the corporate entity Raw Entertainment B.V. registered at Korporaalweg 10 in Curaçao. The licence is real; it is not a New Zealand licence.

Rooster.bet is a Visa/Mastercard cashier with a 20 €/$ deposit floor, instant card deposits and card withdrawals that take 1–3 banking days. The plain card cashier is unusual now and is the operator’s clearest pitch.

BillyBets layers cashback and reload bonuses on sports with a coin shop that exchanges coins earned by depositing, betting, tournaments and challenges for free bets and free spins, and a five-level VIP programme. The coin loop is the brand’s hook.

Megapari’s bonus page is a stack: a free bet worth 15% of the first deposit, a Free Bet Hour giving 50% cashback on football losses returned as a free bet, and a standing sports cashback. The Singapore version shows amounts in SGD; no New Zealand version of the terms was seen in the published material.

Boomerang Bet runs a casino, live casino and sportsbook on a single account with a 100% first-deposit sports bonus up to EUR 100 and a 100% casino welcome up to EUR 500 plus 200 free spins.

Thunderpick recommends crypto for fast deposits and tops that with a 100% deposit bonus up to EUR 600 on the English site; the small print is a EUR 10 minimum per withdrawal and a EUR 20 closing fee on balances at or below EUR 20 — the kind of line that costs a small-balance punter their stake if they walk away without thinking.

Which offshore brand suits which punter

A punter picking between the offshore brands is choosing on bonus shape, cashier speed and crypto support, because the regulatory frame is the same for all of them. The sportsbook-first punter who wants boosted odds, a Same Game Multi on every match and a coin-shop hook is on BillyBets or Megapari. The crypto punter who wants no stated deposit limits and instant withdrawals is on Winz.io or Thunderpick. The casino-first punter who wants the sportsbook as a side product is on Golden Panda, Spinbara, Boomerang Bet or Betninja. The card-only punter who wants a plain Visa/Mastercard cashier with a 20 €/$ floor and instant deposits is on Rooster.bet. The punters who must not use any of them are the ones who want a New Zealand complaint route, the helpline inside the cashier, a New Zealand wallet and a self-exclusion that connects to the rest of the New Zealand harm-minimisation system — they must use TAB or Betcha.

The wider picture

Trustly’s story is a real story in a competitive market: a Swedish open-banking rail that cut card networks out of the deposit flow, drew a SEK 130 million fine from the Swedish regulator in February 2022 and rebuilt its onboarding with a heavier KYC load. In a market where dozens of brands compete for the same punter, the payment rail decides the deposit flow, and Trustly’s flow is fast.

In New Zealand the rail is not the deciding factor, because the law has decided the operator. The punter who wants a Trustly deposit and a same-day withdrawal can get both from the offshore brands in the table above, and the punter who wants a New Zealand account, the 0800 helpline on the same page and a self-exclusion that spans the operator’s whole New Zealand product gets that from TAB and Betcha. The trade-off between those two choices is what the law has made, and the rest is marketing.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use Trustly on betting sites?

Trustly is a Swedish open-banking payment method accepted by a wide range of European-licensed sportsbooks. In New Zealand, the lawful online betting brands are TAB and Betcha, and they publish their own deposit methods rather than a third-party rail. A New Zealand punter wanting a Trustly deposit is being served by an offshore operator that the law has told to stop.

Do any sports betting sites accept Trustly?

Yes — many overseas sportsbooks list Trustly at the cashier, often alongside Pay N Play for combined deposit and identity verification. None of those sites is licensed to take bets from people in New Zealand under section 74AAA of the Racing Industry Act 2020, in force since 28 June 2025.

What betting apps use Trustly?

Apps from European-licensed sportsbooks commonly add Trustly as a deposit and withdrawal method, with the speed depending on the bank’s open-banking support. The two New Zealand-licensed apps are TAB and Betcha, both run by TAB NZ with Entain; their deposit methods are listed in the apps themselves.

Which payment methods does TAB NZ accept, and where are they listed?

TAB NZ publishes its deposit methods, minimums and limits in its own app and on its website. The list is operator-level and changes; reading the cashier page in the TAB or Betcha app before depositing is the most reliable way to see what is on offer at that moment.

Which bookmaker may lawfully take sports and racing bets in New Zealand?

TAB NZ, through its two online brands TAB and Betcha, is the only provider that may lawfully offer racing and sports betting to people in New Zealand under section 74AAA of the Racing Industry Act 2020, in force since 28 June 2025. There is no licensing route for another bookmaker and no register of bookmakers, because there is only one lawful operator.

What does a player lose by betting with a bookmaker that has no New Zealand licence?

The player loses the New Zealand harm-minimisation tools, the New Zealand complaint route and the protections the Department of Internal Affairs oversees. The DIA warns that overseas operators may not return unspent credits or pay out large wins; the operator is breaking section 74AAA by taking the bet, and the player has no in-country channel for a complaint. The New Zealand statute does not set a penalty for the player, but the practical protection that comes with a New Zealand-licensed operator is the difference.

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