iGaming Business

Finland's state-owned gambling company will run a new brand built on Viaplay's sports content in its home market and in Denmark from 1 July 2027. It is Veikkaus's first consumer business outside Finland, and the announcement is silent on the licences the brand will need.

The Netherlands Gambling Authority will take applications in January for the only licence to run pool betting on horse racing from July 2027. The winner gets a land-based monopoly and hands 10% of its gross gaming revenue on Dutch races to the sport.

Caesars Entertainment's net loss more than doubled in the third quarter as weaker Las Vegas business offset growth in its regional casinos and a better quarter for Caesars Digital. It published the numbers without a call or a word from management while it waits for regulators to clear its sale to Fertitta Entertainment.

Finland's licensing authority has given its first official count of awards for the market that opens on 1 July 2027, three times the number operators had announced. Only three of the 12 licensees can be matched to a known operator.

Anthony Lee, his wife Laura Lee and Amy Hind avoided immediate custody at Southwark Crown Court after admitting cheating under section 42 of the Gambling Act 2005. The Gambling Commission calls it the first case of its kind, and 10 more defendants are still to stand trial.

Sweden's racing-owned operator says casino grew 13% in the third quarter, but the growth came entirely from its Danish subsidiary: in Sweden, horse betting, sports betting and casino all earned less than a year ago. The money that funds Swedish trotting and gallop racing shrank with them.

The operator of allbritishcasino.com and six other British-facing sites let customers request only one withdrawal at a time and held back every fifth or tenth withdrawal for some customers for manual review, the regulator found. The Commission is presenting the case as a warning that fairness breaches will be enforced as firmly as money laundering and harm failures.

Malta-based Wildz Group says Finland's National Police Board has granted it a five-year gambling licence starting on 1 July 2027, the first award any operator has announced under the new regime. The board has not confirmed it, and a year ago it was weighing a marketing prohibition against the same group that would have ruled it out.

The Department of Internal Affairs has named the 11 entities that won New Zealand's 15 rights to apply for an online casino licence, at a single price of NZ$15 million each. SkyCity, Stake, TAB New Zealand and companies linked to Super Group and Entain are on the list, but none of them holds a licence yet.

The former Secretary General of the European Gaming and Betting Association is the first Director General of the World Gaming and Betting Alliance, a Swiss association whose listed members are bet365, Entain, FDJ United, Flutter and EGBA itself. The Geneva commercial register shows it was founded on 9 July and already had Haijer as a signatory before EGBA announced he was leaving.

Nevada's gaming regulator has gathered a decade of scattered technical rules for casino systems into ten draft standards, and the target date has moved from this month to 1 October 2027. Little of the text is new; what changes is that the controls must now be built into the systems suppliers get approved.

The Council of State has upheld the €100 weekly cash cap at Italy's top-up shops and struck down a ban on internet-connected devices there, while the decree meant to reorganise betting shops, gaming halls and machines lapsed in August. Rulings, not legislation, are now setting the rules for retail.

The Åland operator behind mycasino.ch will give Meta licence documents and website addresses so Facebook and Instagram can tell Swiss licensees from offshore operators and their affiliates. Meta has said nothing publicly, and the pilot comes a week after Dutch operators took the platform to court.

The London-listed events group is paying 11.1 times Clarion's expected 2027 EBITDA, part-funded by a £940 million share placing. The gambling industry's largest trade show is about to pass from private equity to a listed owner that names gaming as a growth category.

The Ministry of Finance has listed kalshi.com as a site offering prohibited gambling, and internet providers must block it by 15 October. The order covers the website only, but it puts the largest US prediction market on the same footing in Czechia as an unlicensed online casino.

Macau's casinos won MOP18.06 billion in September, 1.2% less than a year earlier and 17.5% less than in August: the fourth monthly decline in a row and the weakest month of the year. It came in below a comparison base that a typhoon had already cut, and almost exactly at the figure Citigroup cut its forecast to ten days ago. It was published on the first day of Golden Week.

The Ministry of Culture and Equality has put online poker for the state monopoly out to a fast-track consultation, two years after Norsk Tipping asked for it. The proposal comes with tight stakes, loss and table limits, and an open question about whether a Norway-only player pool can compete with the foreign sites it is meant to replace.

The government wants operating a betting site to carry four to six years in prison and has asked Congress to treat the bill as urgent. At the same time, operators' associations have asked the Supreme Federal Tribunal to suspend the ban, arguing that it fails the Constitution's own test for a provisional measure.

PAGCOR's chairman wants the online market written into statute before his term ends, so that it "will not easily be scrapped". A Hong Kong-listed newcomer has meanwhile shown how much of that market still rests on the regulator's accreditations, and how quickly they can go.

GiG Software has signed a share purchase agreement for evoke's African operator and says the proposed deal will be finalised by 30 September. The signing puts a clock on the deferred payment and, for the first time, numbers on the business GiG is buying.

Provisional Measure 1.394 ends Brazil's licensed betting market less than two years after it opened, extinguishes every licence within 30 days and rules out refunding the R$30 million each operator paid for one. It took effect on Friday, nine days before the first round of the presidential election.

Tim Miller, a senior figure at the Gambling Commission for about a decade, has set up an advisory firm aimed at governments and regulators rather than operators, starting in North America. He says it will not be "just another compliance consultancy", and has already said what he thinks does not work: blanket prohibitions and ever-higher taxes.

The Conservative leader told The Sun that Labour is in a "tax doom loop" and that the operators who follow the rules will be the ones to close. Her intervention lands five weeks before a Budget in which the Treasury is reported to be modelling a doubling of Machine Games Duty, and as the Betting and Gaming Council puts the cost at up to 16,000 jobs.

Tarcísio de Freitas told a healthcare debate that Brazil must choose between ending betting and being ended by it, framing the country's regulated market as a public-health emergency comparable to tobacco. He is seeking re-election, and he is not the only senior politician to have found the subject.