POLi vs Skrill: Comparing Online Payment Methods

POLi and Skrill get lumped together in "online casino payment method" lists constantly, but they're built around opposite philosophies. POLi is a single-purpose tool: it exists to authorise one payment, straight out of your New Zealand bank account, with no balance, no account registration beyond your existing banking login, and nothing left over afterwards. Skrill is the opposite — it's an e-wallet, meaning you top up a balance once (or repeatedly) and then spend from that balance however and wherever Skrill is accepted, which includes plenty of places well outside New Zealand.

What POLi actually is

POLi is a bank-direct payment initiator built specifically for the New Zealand (and Australian) market. There's no POLi account to create in the way you'd create a PayPal or Skrill account — you simply authenticate with your existing bank login each time you use it. It has no balance of its own, no stored value, and crucially, no mechanism to send money back to you. It is pay-in only, full stop. For the mechanics of how the authorisation flow actually works, see our how POLi payments work explainer.

What Skrill actually is

Skrill is a long-running global e-wallet. You create an account, verify your identity, and fund a Skrill balance from a bank transfer, card, or other supported method. From there, that balance is yours to spend at any merchant that accepts Skrill — which, relevantly, includes a large number of offshore online casinos, because Skrill built its product specifically to serve high-risk and cross-border merchant categories that traditional banks are cautious about. Just as importantly, Skrill works in reverse: a casino can pay winnings back into your Skrill balance, and from there you can withdraw to your bank or card. POLi has no equivalent withdrawal path at all.

Why Skrill gets accepted where POLi doesn't

The core reason comes back to who the casino is actually transacting with. When a casino integrates POLi, it would be transacting directly with your NZ bank through POLi's rail — squarely inside the territory New Zealand's Gambling Act 2003 makes payment facilitators nervous about, as we cover on our POLi deposit casinos pillar page. When a casino integrates Skrill, it's transacting with Skrill's own payment infrastructure, which is domiciled and regulated separately from any individual player's home bank. Skrill carries its own compliance obligations, but it has built a business model around being usable at merchants — including gambling operators — that mainstream domestic bank rails tend to avoid.

Side-by-side comparison

Getting set up with each

POLi has no real setup process at all — the first time you use it is functionally identical to every subsequent time, because you're simply logging into your own bank through a redirect. There's nothing to register in advance, and nothing that carries over from one payment to the next beyond whatever your bank itself remembers about you.

Skrill asks for considerably more upfront. You create an account with an email and password, then go through an identity verification step — typically a form of photo ID and sometimes proof of address — before the account can be used for anything beyond very limited amounts. This is standard practice for regulated e-money institutions, not something specific to Skrill, but it does mean the first use of Skrill takes meaningfully longer than the first use of POLi. Once that verification is done, though, it's done; you don't repeat it for every transaction the way you re-authenticate with your bank each time you use POLi.

Currency handling

POLi transacts in New Zealand dollars, in line with its NZ-bank-rail design — there's no multi-currency handling involved because it was never meant to cross borders. Skrill, by contrast, is built to hold and convert between multiple currencies, which is part of why it works smoothly at merchants based outside New Zealand. That flexibility comes at a cost: currency conversion fees are one of the more common charges Skrill applies, and they can add up if you're regularly moving money between NZD and whatever currency a given offshore merchant operates in. It's worth checking the conversion rate Skrill applies against the actual market rate before assuming the fee is trivial.

The honest verdict

For general NZ retail and bill payments, POLi is a fine, low-friction tool and there's no real reason to reach for an e-wallet instead. But for the specific job of funding and cashing out of an offshore online casino account, Skrill is the more practical option today, and it's not particularly close — it was built to serve exactly that kind of cross-border, higher-risk merchant relationship, and it supports the withdrawal leg that POLi simply doesn't have. That doesn't mean Skrill is risk-free or fee-free; it means the two tools aren't really interchangeable for this purpose.

Frequently asked questions