Wire Transfer Casinos

Wire Transfer, or Bank Transfer, is a common payment method for depositing and withdrawing funds from online casinos. Considering that everyone who has an online casino account likely also has a bank account, it is perhaps surprising that more people don’t utilise this payment method steeped in almost 150 years of history. Though there are benefits to wire transfers, there are also reasons why other methods are preferable.

150 Year History

The history of the wire transfer is tangled up in the telegram wires. Western Union, which started life as the New York and Western Union Telegraph Company, began to use its wires not simply for sending telegrams but also sending money. In 1872, the company found that with passwords and code books, the telegraph operators were able to securely send money from one telegraph office to another. The customer would deposit the funds at his station, and operator “wired” the information to the local telegraph office of whomever was the recipient. Then, the receiving office could pay the wired amount to the intended payee.

Although the name, Wire Transfer, has stuck and the process is broadly similar, the electronic networks that we use today are much more advanced. You can now “wire” money to the most far-flung corners of the earth, not just across the North American prairies.

How does it work?

No physical money is sent, another trait shared with the earliest telegraph transfers. The network that exists between hundreds of banks around the globe is designed to send and receive information in the quickest and most secure manner possible. Wire Transfers allow people in any part of the world to send money to anybody else in the world via their financial institutions.

The information that is sent from the origin institution to the destination institution includes the intended recipient’s name, bank account number, maybe some further verification like address, and the amount of money they are to receive.

The payer who is initiating the wire transfer, pays for the wire costs upfront, usually in some form of fee or sometimes it is absorbed by the institution. The recipient’s bank will receive the information fairly promptly, and provided there are no obvious security doubts, will deposit the funds into the payee’s account from their own coffers. It is not until after the transaction has taken place, that the two financial institutions involved will settle the bill.

Often, domestic wire transfers can complete on the same day. International wire transfers may take 1 or 2 business days because the amount of clearing that must be done is doubled. Each country will have their own “wire” regulations, so the security is duplicated.

Wire Transfers to Casinos

Given that domestic transfers in New Zealand often do not incur fees, and that nominally it seems like a quick process, why aren’t wire transfers to and from your online casino more popular?

The reality is that credit/debit card payments as well as E-Wallet transactions are much more efficient when it comes to depositing and withdrawing from online casinos. Ostensibly, this is because it takes the casinos and the financial institutions more time to verify the identity and the security of these transactions.

For example, it may take a bank transfer deposit 3-5 days to reach the casino. Even more scarily, it may take 5-10 working days for a player’s withdrawal to reach their bank account. Compared to the often-instantaneous deposits and withdrawals with other casino payment methods, this just seems archaic.

The good news is that often the deposit and withdrawal maximums on bank transfers can be huge; sometimes as much as $100,000.

Below is an example of the sort of information you will need to provide for both NZ domestic and International Wire Transfers: