FDJ United pivots from dealmaking to platform control as Kindred stack rolls out across Europe
FDJ United has shifted its online betting and gaming strategy from acquisitions to technology transformation, with CEO Stéphane Pallez outlining accelerated internal platform migration, stack consolidation, and stricter focus on platform control as tax and regulatory pressure intensifies across Europe.
• FDJ United says its online betting and gaming unit has shifted from an acquisition led playbook to a technology transformation focused on internal migration and stack consolidation.
• CEO Stéphane Pallez said the former Kindred business is in a strong transformation after FDJ completed the €2.45 billion acquisition in October 2024 and finished integration.
• The group has separated its exclusive rights lottery activity from competitive online betting in France, split player accounts, and merged Parions Sport en Ligne and ZEturf.
• Casino operations are now fully internalised from a technology perspective, while the internal sportsbook platform is expanding across markets including the UK, Romania and Estonia.
• Pallez linked the strategic focus to tougher tax and regulatory conditions, highlighting concerns around the Netherlands and upcoming UK duty increases from April 2026 and 2027.
FDJ United is accelerating the rollout of an internalised technology stack across its key markets, with chief executive Stéphane Pallez telling investors the group’s online betting and gaming strategy has moved away from acquisitions and towards platform migration and consolidation.
Speaking during the group’s FY25 earnings call after publishing full year 2025 results, Pallez said the online betting and gaming unit, previously operated by Kindred, is undergoing what she described as a strong transformation. The comments came as the company reported year on year revenue declines across several areas, including online betting and gaming. FDJ completed its €2.45 billion acquisition of Kindred in October 2024 and said integration is now complete.
Pallez said the next stage is to extract more value from Kindred’s operations across the broader FDJ portfolio over the coming years. She framed the work as being driven largely by technology migration, alongside structural separation commitments provided to competition authorities.
In France, FDJ has already completed the separation of its exclusive rights lottery activities from its competitive online betting business. That has included splitting player accounts and merging Parions Sport en Ligne with ZEturf. The remaining major milestone in the French market will be a future migration onto the Kindred player account management platform used across other jurisdictions in the group.
Outside France, FDJ continues to expand its internally built sportsbook platform, with deployments already in place in the UK, Romania and Estonia. Poker and casino operations are also increasingly supported through proprietary technology. Casino, which generated more than half of online betting and gaming revenue in 2025, has already been fully internalised from a technology stack perspective.
Pallez described the migration of France onto the Kindred player account management system as the most technically complex piece of the programme, but she stressed it is not time critical. She said it would be completed in the coming years.
Across other product lines, the internalisation agenda is further advanced. Casino is already on proprietary technology. Poker in France is expected to transition to Relax Gaming’s in house stack as Unibet branding is consolidated later in the second quarter.
Sports betting is progressing on a similar path. In France, sportsbook operations are fully supported by an in house platform. Internationally, FDJ has deployed its proprietary KSP solution in Romania, the UK and Estonia. Pallez said just under 60 per cent of sportsbook revenue is fully internalised in France. The remaining markets yet to migrate include the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium and Australia, although she characterised that footprint as very small.
Pallez also tied the focus on platform control to rising tax and regulatory pressures in core European markets. She criticised the direction of reforms in the Netherlands, arguing the regulated market has been shrinking by around 25 per cent, with activity moving offshore and reducing tax receipts. In the UK, she said upcoming tax changes are expected to affect online gaming from 2026, with additional effects on sports betting from 2027. She referenced a rise in UK remote gaming duty from 21 per cent to 40 per cent from April 2026, and remote sports betting duty from 15 per cent to 25 per cent in 2027.
On future dealmaking, Pallez said further acquisitions are not the immediate priority for the online betting and gaming division. Any future activity, she added, would need to align with the ongoing platform migration programme. She played down the prospect of major moves linked to the next football World Cup cycle and suggested that the more likely focus for transactions, tenders or investment would be in lottery, particularly internationally. She also pointed to the United States as a market where FDJ sees opportunity in online lottery, describing initiatives there as smaller in investment terms for now.
FDJ United’s message is a familiar one for large scale operators that have reached a certain point in consolidation: once the portfolio is assembled, technology becomes the primary lever for margin protection and operational control. In a tightening European environment, owning more of the stack reduces vendor dependence, improves speed of change, and makes compliance delivery less fragmented across brands and markets.
The French separation work is especially material because it sits at the intersection of competition commitments and customer experience. Splitting player accounts and reorganising brand assets is operationally heavy, and it carries retention risk if the customer journey becomes inconsistent. That is why the planned move onto a single player account management layer matters, even if management says it is not urgent. A unified account layer is often the foundation for consistent risk controls, safer gambling tooling, and cross product personalisation.
Regulatory and tax shocks are also pushing management teams to favour platforms that can be tuned quickly. If duty rates rise sharply, product economics change overnight and operators need flexibility to recalibrate bonuses, pricing, and risk settings without waiting on third parties. FDJ’s pivot away from major acquisitions and towards internal migration reads as a bet that the next cycle of advantage in Europe will be built on resilience and execution, not on owning more licences.
Sources
Why This Matters
iGaming Times analysis: Platform consolidation onto a single technology stack across a multi-brand European group is the post-acquisition phase where actual synergy capture happens, and where it most often slips. The Kindred-stack rollout is a useful test of whether the acquired platform can absorb FDJ's volume and product complexity at the cost-take-out targets implied at deal time, or whether technology-debt friction extends the integration calendar by several quarters. The trade-press signalling tone in 2H 2026 will be the cleanest read.
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