POLi closed in Australia in 2023: what players use instead

POLi in Australia: closed since 30 September 2023

POLi Payments' Australian operation ceased on 30 September 2023. Australia Post, which owned the business, announced the closure in July 2023, and the service was wound down over the following ten weeks. Merchants were notified in advance — a sports-administration platform, for example, published a customer notice in July 2023 telling its Australian clients it would no longer be able to offer POLi from September.

So there is no live POLi option for an Australian player at any merchant, casino or otherwise. Not a reduced version, not one available at some banks, not one that works if you try a different browser. The rails were switched off three years ago.

POLi was popular for exactly the reason that made it attractive at a cashier: it moved money straight out of a bank account, instantly, with no card involved. Nothing filled that gap on identical terms, and the sections below set out what each of its functions became.

Why it closed: the banks withdrew the vector first

The closure was not a regulatory decision and not a company failure in the ordinary sense. It was the banks.

POLi worked by taking a customer's internet-banking credentials and logging in on their behalf to push the payment. That design was the whole product, and it had been contested for years: Australian banks had warned since at least 2015 that handing internet-banking logins to a third party was likely to breach their own electronic-banking terms, which left it unclear whether a customer was protected if something went wrong.

What finished it was acceptance. By POLi's own account, two major banks had stopped accepting the POLi vector the previous year and a third advised it would stop from mid-July 2023. With banks also moving to fraud-prevention systems incompatible with the way POLi connected, the business was no longer viable, and POLi's general manager said so publicly at the time.

The takeaway is the mechanism rather than the history: a payment method that depends on the banks tolerating it can disappear in a quarter, and merchant demand does not keep it alive. Which rail a cashier actually uses matters more than which logos it shows.

POLi still works in New Zealand — and that is why search results are wrong

The New Zealand side of POLi continued operating after the Australian closure, supported through a local distributor, and ownership of POLi moved to that distributor in October 2023. POLi is therefore a current, functioning payment method in New Zealand and a dead one in Australia at the same time.

That single fact explains a large share of the misinformation an Australian reader meets. A page written about POLi, or an operator's payment list compiled from regional data, can be entirely accurate for New Zealand and entirely wrong for Australia. Automated content and loosely localised comparison tables do not make that distinction, which is how "POLi casinos" lists survive three years after the Australian service ended.

Checked in October 2026, the first page of results for Australian POLi casino searches still consisted largely of pages promising the best POLi casinos of the current year — several hosted on unrelated domains, including a Brazilian retailer, an Indian college and a UN-agency subdomain, which is the signature of injected spam rather than an honest mistake. If you arrived here from one of those pages: they are not describing anything that exists.

How to tell a payment list was last checked before 2023

You can date most Australian casino payment lists in about fifteen seconds, using four tells. Any one of them puts the whole list in doubt.

• POLi is listed for Australia. Dead since 30 September 2023. This is the cleanest single test available.
• Credit cards are offered for deposits. Credit cards, credit-related products and digital currency have not been permitted for online wagering in Australia since 11 June 2024. A cashier screen still presenting one tells you when the page was built.
• Deposit and withdrawal are shown as one list. They are different lists at nearly every operator, and a page that merges them has not looked at a cashier recently.
• No payment reference instruction for bank-rail methods. If a list explains PayID without mentioning the reference you must attach, it was not written by anyone who has used it.

Our own general payment page is casino payment methods in Australia, and the single-method pages behind it are PayID casinos and POLi casino Australia, which carries the closure notice.

There is no like-for-like replacement, and what that means

Nothing available in Australia today does what POLi did in one step. The function split three ways: a PayID-based instant transfer for the real-time part, pay-by-bank checkout products for merchants that had been integrated with POLi, and ordinary bank transfer for the rest. For a player it comes down to one change — the push now starts in your banking app rather than on the merchant's page.

That difference is not cosmetic. With POLi, the merchant's page collected your credentials and initiated the payment, so the merchant knew immediately which payment belonged to which account. With PayID or bank transfer, you initiate it from your own bank, and the only thing linking it to your casino account is the reference string you type. Hand the reference to the player and you hand over the single point of failure — which is why the most common Australian deposit problem in 2026 is not a declined payment but a completed one nobody can match. See payment reference tracing.

PayID: the closest successor, and what it does differently

PayID is an addressing layer over Australia's real-time payments infrastructure: instead of a BSB and account number you send to a registered identifier such as a phone number, email address or ABN, and before confirming you are shown the registered name of the account you are about to pay. Most banks do not charge personal customers to use it.

Four differences from POLi matter at a cashier.

• You hold your own credentials. Nothing third-party logs into your bank. This is the main improvement and it is substantial.
• The name check happens before you send. The registered account name is displayed, which catches a wrong recipient before the money moves rather than after.
• The reference is your responsibility. POLi carried the identification; PayID does not. Copy the reference exactly, including case and spacing, and do not add words to it.
• There is no chargeback on this rail. Card-style reversal does not exist here. What exists is the mistaken-payment process under the ePayments Code, which applies to payments sent in error, requires both banks to agree, and may not return the funds.

That last point is the one readers underestimate, and it is the reason a two-minute check of the cashier's reference instruction is worth more than any speed comparison.

Bank transfer, debit cards, and what the 2024 credit ban removed

Three routes remain in normal use, and they are not interchangeable. PayID is the fast one: minutes rather than days, with the reference carrying the identification. Bank transfer by BSB and account number is the same rail without the addressing layer, slower mainly because it is more often batched. Debit cards still work, and the distinction from credit is legal rather than technical — a debit card draws on your own funds and is unaffected by the 2024 measure.

What was removed is specific. Since 11 June 2024, under the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Credit and Other Measures) Act 2023, credit cards, credit-related products and digital currency cannot be accepted for online wagering in Australia. Lotteries and keno are excluded from the ban. The obligation falls on the service provider rather than on the player, and the regulator is the ACMA. The fuller version is on the credit card ban.

One more practical note that applies to all three: the currency the balance is held in. If a cashier quotes AUD but settles in another currency, every deposit and every payout carries a conversion spread you will not see itemised. See AUD to USD deposit conversion and deposit fees and the credited amount.

POLi then, PayID now: what changed for the player

A checklist for reading any casino payment list in 2026

Six checks, in the order that catches the most problems earliest.

• Does the list show POLi or a credit card for Australia? If yes, stop trusting the list and read the cashier instead.
• Is there a separate withdrawal list, and is your intended method on it? The deposit list is not the payout list.
• What exact reference string does a bank-rail deposit need, and where is it displayed?
• What currency is the balance held in, and is conversion applied on the way in, the way out, or both?
• What are the minimums — deposit and withdrawal — and the per-period payout ceiling? See minimum deposit after fees and rolling withdrawal limits.
• Must documents clear before a first payout? Nearly always yes, and that is the real first-payout delay.

Screenshot the answers with the date. Cashier terms change without notice, and the page as it read on the day you deposited is the only version a later complaint can be measured against.

Practical questions

Related decisions