A few weeks ago, our CEO Mark Meyer called from the road. He was on a tour of the Northeast meeting with credit union leaders, and he said something that stuck with me. “I’ve been in multiple conversations over the past three days where credit union executives have, unprompted, brought up concerns about members and online gambling. Do we have any data on this? I think it could be a real emerging issue.”
I hung up, connected with the team, and we called Cole at Vertice AI.
Through Member Pulse, Filene’s credit union member segmentation platform provided through our partnership with Vertice AI, we have access to anonymized, aggregated transaction data covering millions of members and billions of transactions. So, we went looking.
Here is what we found.
Over 9% of checking account holders show gambling or prediction market transactions. We believe that is just the floor. Anything members are doing through non-credit union cards or accounts is invisible to us, so the real number is almost certainly higher.
Betting skews young. Our data shows that almost 10% of Gen Z and 8.5% of Millennials show betting activity in their transactions. For Boomers, the number is under 2.5%. The younger members are the ones moving money to online gambling and prediction markets, and they are doing it at significant scale.
Bettors are not saving like non-bettors. When we control for age and segment, checking balances look about the same. But non-bettors are building savings, money market, and certificate balances. Bettors are not. Our data shows that heavy bettors had a 56% lower median deposit account balances compared to casual bettors.
States that legalized sports betting saw a 1.7% credit score drop, a 25% increase in bankruptcies, and a lower household savings rate (Hollenbeck, Larsen, and Proserpio, UCLA/USC working paper, 2024).
Now for the finding that should make every credit union pause. Our Filene Member Pulse model groups credit union members into behavioral segments based on how they actually use their money, not just who they are on paper. One of those segments is Hopeful Help-Seekers. These are members who are showing real financial stress in their transaction patterns, but who are also engaged with their credit union and open to guidance. In other words, the members you most want to reach.
Roughly 18% of Hopeful Help-Seekers under 40 are bettors. Almost one in five!
The macro picture lines up with what we are seeing in the data. The American Gaming Association 2025 reported that Americans wagered $166.94 billion through legal sportsbooks in 2025, an 11% increase over 2024.
And that figure does not include prediction markets, which are growing fast. Our data showed a 1400% increase in money movement to prediction market sites in the last 6 months from previous periods.
This is not just a sports betting story. Filene’s recent Vice Economy report, written by Kimberly Lear of Inlay Insights and Filene Fellow, frames the bigger picture well. Gen Z is navigating an environment shaped by social media driven overconsumption and an “accessible casino” that lives in their pocket. Roughly 60% of college age men are gambling on sports (Business Insider, citing Michael Lewis).
These are exactly the members credit unions need to grow and keep. They are also the members who stand to benefit the most from the kind of guidance and support credit unions are uniquely built to provide.
We are not ready to declare this an epidemic. We cannot yet prove it is driving deposit erosion at any one institution. What we can say is that the activity is more widespread than most credit union leaders assume, it is concentrated in the members you most want to grow with, and it is showing up in the transaction data if you go looking for it.
We also do not have the full “so what” yet. What we want to do is start the conversation.
So we are asking you. What are you seeing in your transaction data? Are your members betting more than you think? And if they are, what do you believe credit unions should actually do about it?
We will keep talking with leaders. We will keep looking at the data as it evolves. And we will share what we learn as we learn it.
Reach out to Stephen Arnold ([email protected]), Filene’s Chief Strategy and Enterprise Development Officer to learn more about the power of Member Pulse.
Endnotes
- American Gaming Association, State of the States 2025. https://www.americangaming.org/resources/state-of-the-states-2025/
- Filene Research Institute, Report No. 652, The Vice Economy: The Modern Temptations Threatening Gen Z’s Financial Future, by Kimberly Lear, Inlay Insights. https://filene.org/652
- Business Insider, Peter Kafka interview with Michael Lewis on sports betting (February 5, 2025). https://www.businessinsider.com/michael-lewis-sports-betting-podcast-peter-kafka-interview-2025-2
- Hollenbeck, Brett, Poet Larsen, and Davide Proserpio, The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling, UCLA Anderson School of Management and University of Southern California, 2024. https://ssrn.com/abstract=4903302
