Unified TsUPIS: Russian bettors’ average ticket is down, and the market is losing active users

Unified TsUPIS commercial director Artyom Sychev gave a fairly blunt readout on the Russian betting market: average deposit and withdrawal tickets are down by about ₽100, the market is expected to shrink by about 5%, and year on year roughly 100,000 fewer people are playing. For PSPs and acquiring teams, the more interesting bit is the payment mix: SBP (the Faster Payments System) keeps taking share from cards.

1. Sychev said the average player ticket has fallen by about ₽100 both on deposits and withdrawals. His overall market forecast points to a decline of about 5%, with roughly 100,000 fewer active players year on year. Looking at less active users, the drop is close to half a million players.
2. He also said retention metrics are at levels he has not seen since the early 2020s. The stated reasons are straightforward: operators have cut marketing budgets, and the freebet arms race has been paused for now. In other words, the market is adjusting to a less generous acquisition environment.
3. Unified TsUPIS data for August 2025 to July 2026 shows a steady downward trend in average deposit turnover per client, from about ₽69,000 in August 2025 to about ₽58,500 in July 2026, despite local spikes along the way.
4. In August 2026, deposits totaled ₽151.7 billion and withdrawals ₽116.5 billion. The payment structure is shifting clearly toward SBP: on deposits, SBP accounted for 53.3% (+11.4 percentage points year on year), bank cards for 27.0% (−12.9 pp), the TsUPIS wallet and DC (OnBank) for 9.6% (+2.8 pp), SberPay for 7.2% (−1.7 pp), Yoomoney wallet for 0.8%, and other channels for 2.1%. On withdrawals, SBP reached 55.1% (+15.5 pp), bank cards 29.3% (−23.2 pp), the TsUPIS wallet and DC (OnBank) 10.8% (+2.8 pp), and bank accounts and Yoomoney 0.5% each.
5. Card payments also shifted inside the card stack itself. Since the start of 2025, the share of Mir cards rose from about 20% to a peak of about 32% in summer 2025, then slipped back to around 24% today. Mastercard and Visa had practically fallen to zero by November 2025 and have stayed in the 1–2% range since then.
6. For the first 9 months of 2026, the share of active players using only one bookmaker reached 75.6% (+2.9 pp year on year), which means brand loyalty has increased. At the same time, 15.3% of players used two bookmakers (−1.5 pp), 5% used three, 2.1% used four (−0.4 pp), and only 1% used five or more (−0.2 pp).
7. Even with higher loyalty, users who do try a second bookmaker are moving faster. Since the start of 2026, the average time from the first payment at bookmaker No. 1 to the first payment at bookmaker No. 2 has fallen to 20 days (−2 days year on year), while the median has dropped to 2 days (−1 day). That is the kind of detail payment teams care about when mapping cross-brand behavior.

The practical read-through for high-risk PSPs is simple: in Russia’s betting market, SBP keeps gaining at the expense of cards, and the active customer base is shrinking even as retention improves. If you are underwriting or optimizing for this vertical, the payment rail mix matters more, not less.