Customers of the enormous FanDuel sports-betting platform will have the ability this year to wager on the Kentucky Derby directly from their regular accounts for the first time, a feature that officials for the company and Churchill Downs Inc. believe could lead to a significant jump in betting on the race.

The feature generating the excitement is the so-called “shared wallet,” which FanDuel debuted late last year. The shared wallet allows FanDuel’s sports betting customers to use their deposits to make bets through the platform’s horse racing account-wagering operation, TVG. While sports bets are made on a fixed-odds system, horse racing bets need to be sent into the vast commingled parimutuel betting system that racing uses.