eps Casinos

There are many ways in which online casino players are able to transfer money into and out of their online casino accounts. The most commonly-used methods are debit cards and credit cards, although many jurisdictions have since 2020 cracked down on the availability of ‘gambling by credit’.

eWallets such as PayPal, Skrill and Neteller, alongside cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are other commonly-used transfer methods, but a popular alternative is to use an online banking payments facilitator. These methods link a player’s casino account to their online banking facility.

The only issue with this is that such systems are only available to players in a specific country. For example, Interac is only available to people in Canada, iDeal which is for residents of the Netherlands, and EasyEFT for players in South Africa. For online casino players in Austria, their option is to use eps.

A Brief History of eps

The payments system eps was founded in 2006 in the Netherlands by a small group of entrepreneurs as ‘Adyen’. Their aim was to create a global payments facilitator that would link any merchant that accepted Adyen with any bank in the world signed up for the Adyen platform. When the company discovered that because of regulatory issues this would not be possible, they instead decided to create similar payment systems ‘per country’.

In their native Netherlands they are responsible for that country’s leading online payments system iDeal, and in Brazil they own the ‘cash to online’ payment system Boleto. With help from the Austrian government and all the leading Austrian banks, they created eps in 2010.

eps – Pros and Cons

Pros

• If you have an Austrian bank account, you already have eps.
• Uses bank-standard encryption – safe and secure.
• Easy to use.

Cons

• Only available to people with Austrian bank accounts.
• Not all online casinos have the function to use eps.

How to use eps at Online Casinos

Even though it stands for ‘electronic payment standard’, what normally would be the acronym ‘EPS’ is always styled ‘eps’, much to the annoyance of language lovers the world over!

There is no set up to be done if you want to use eps at an online casino. If you have an Austrian bank account then the eps function is already available to you. All the major banks in Austria accept eps payments, including the following:

• EGB (Erste Group Bank)
• RVB Group
• UniCredit Bank Austria
• BAWAG PSK
• Raiffeisen Bank
• Oesterreichische Kontrolbank
• OberBank
• HYPO NOE

Austria is something of a haven for banks, as they’re over seven hundred of them. The vast majority of them allow eps payments. If you don’t have a bank account that accepts eps payments then it’s fairly easy to open one and you can do so either online or in person. Of course, you will need to prove residency in Austria in order to do so.

When making your payment via eps, all you need to do is head to your online casino’s cashier and select eps as your payment method, and the amount that you wish to deposit. You will be taken through to the eps applet which will ask you to select the bank where you have an account from which you wish to transfer money.

The next applet that pops up with being the one familiar to you if you use online banking. You will be asked to enter your username and password. This applet is provided by the bank itself, so your online safety is absolutely secure. Once you have confirmed the payment you will be shown a confirmation page which means that your payment has been completed.

Your money should show in your online casino account almost immediately. Many eps transactions are free but some will have a transaction fee of around €0.10 plus 1.3% and €0.20. These fees are charged by the bank and eps, and not your online casino. Your online casino should not take any payment for making a deposit and if it does, you really need to consider choosing a different online casino.

Online casino withdrawals via eps are not as simple as deposits. Merchants can set up eps so that they can offer refunds to their customers, but this takes extra steps. Online casinos may choose not to set up this facility in order to pay their customers. Using online banking to make payments to a customer is simply not as easy as using online banking to take payments from a customer. If you use eps at an online casino you are likely to find that it’s a one-way process. You will have to choose an alternative payment method if you want to make a withdrawal.

Conclusion

Security is always an issue when making payments online as fraudulent behaviour via the internet is always a problem. When you select a payments system to use, you will want to choose one where your levels of security are as secure as possible.

As eps uses a bank’s encryption system for online payments you can rest assured that any transactions you enact via eps are absolutely secure, at an online casino or anywhere else online.

When using eps you should always follow strictly responsible gambling practices – for example, you should never gamble with money that you cannot afford to lose.

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