Bettina Sommer, SVP of sales at DIMOCO, explains why the addition of the mobile payment method will be so important for operators in Europe’s fourth-largest online gambling market.
Anyone knowledgeable about payments will know that Germans have different payment preferences to most of their European peers. The most obvious difference is that they continue to use cash to a much greater extent than those in other countries on the continent.
However, this is changing fast as payments for goods and services are increasingly being digitised, forcing consumers to adapt. But given Germans have always been far less fond of cards than those in neighbouring countries, any idea such a shift will simply move them from cash to cards seems unlikely.
This is evident from looking at the way players pay for igaming transactions. While Worldpay’s Global Payments Report 2025 revealed that card payments dominated in major markets such as the UK, Australia, France and the US last year, in Germany they accounted for a very small proportion of payments. Here, digital wallets and account-to-account payments made up the overwhelming majority of igaming payments.
In terms of the latter, the most popular A2A method in Germany has long been Giropay, but this was removed from the market last year. Thus, it seems there’s a clear opportunity for an alternate digital payment method to fill the gap. The big question is, which one?
Market ripe for payment disruption
We think direct carrier billing is a prime contender for several reasons. Its simplicity and seamlessness have particular appeal to German consumers given their enduring love of cash, which many attribute largely to a desire for privacy and anonymity.
A German consumer faced with the choice between giving all their details to sign up for an account to pay for a new service or simply buying it via their mobile phone operator, which already has all their data, is highly likely to choose the latter.
Indeed, we’ve already seen huge take-up of carrier billing for small mobility payments such as bike rentals and parking in Germany – items that would typically have been paid for with cash in the past.
We believe DCB usage will be similarly high in igaming now that the regulator, Gemeinsame Glücksspielbehörde der Länder, has authorised us to offer it, with our first client being NEO.bet. If a sports fan is at a Bundesliga game and wants to make a bet, a few clicks to pay for that bet via their phone bill is infinitely quicker and easier than any alternative.
And there are very few who won’t have a phone in their hand allowing them to do so – mobile network operator association GSMA data shows that last year the country had a mobile subscriber penetration rate of 87% and a smartphone adoption rate of 83%. It predicts it will have the most smartphone connections in Europe by 2030.
Because of the huge number of devices owned in the country, to my mind DCB is not just a payment method, it’s an acquisition tool that gives igaming operators a new opportunity to target Germany’s consumers.
We provide carrier billing to a number of gaming operators in our home market of Austria, where consumers’ payment preferences are very similar to those in Germany. Our biggest partner there offers 20 payment methods, but of these DCB is the third most popular.
In a context where the only market where Worldpay’s report said carrier billing had so far achieved a significant market share was Finland – and even then this was just 3% – it would seem the payment method is already punching above its weight in the igaming world.
Barriers falling away
But we think it has much further to go. One reason DCB failed to gain traction in the past was because it was uncompetitive when compared with the cost of other payment methods. However, much has changed over the past decade and it is now comparable with a payment method such as PayPal in Germany on a cost basis.
Its pricing is also far more transparent, with one fixed percentage charge as opposed to the multiple charges involved in card payments. And, of particular interest to igaming companies, there’s a lower risk of chargebacks.
In large part, the positive changes to the DCB offering have come about thanks to mobile operators realising the revenue potential available to them. In Germany rival operators have even joined together to launch the joint brand Zahl einfach per Handyrechnung (simply pay via mobile phone bill).
Such developments perhaps go some way to explaining why Market Research Future expects the German DCB market size to grow from US$2.8bn in 2024 to US$10bn in 2035. The potential extends beyond Germany too. Research released by independent analyst firm Juniper Research last year predicted global mobile operator revenue from carrier billing transactions will rise by 59% by 2029.
All signs point to a bright future for DCB and when it comes to the German igaming market, we think the payment method will prove a game-changer.
