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About Agent Ace
This summer, the Commission reached settlements of £900,000 with Betfred over safer gambling failures, £4.75 million with Evolution over weaknesses in its AML risk assessment and supply-chain oversight, and £122,835 with Stakelogic after games were found to be running faster than permitted.
Taken together, the cases provide further ammunition for the anti-gambling lobby at a time when it is already facing political pressure, tax increases and demands for tighter restrictions. Each apparently avoidable failure makes it harder for the industry to argue that existing regulation is sufficient.
Yet Dan Waugh, partner at Regulus Partners, pushes back against the idea that enforcement notices reveal a fundamentally non-compliant sector.
About Agent Ace
But for Klebanow, the lesson Japan should take from Macau and Singapore extends beyond the importance of non-gaming attractions. It is also about how regulation should work. Policymakers, he argues, should establish basic legal and commercial guardrails, while giving operators sufficient “latitude” to “propose and develop projects that best serve both the residential and tourism markets”.
He points to Macau’s Cotai Strip and Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands and Resorts World Sentosa as examples of how regulatory discipline can coexist with considerable freedom for developers to innovate. “At its core, Japan’s policies need to be pragmatic and allow for developments to succeed – not constrain them to the point that they risk failure.”
When asked which operator will be willing to take the risk and ultimately win Japan’s next “licence lottery”, Klebanow contends that it depends on how restrictive – or attainable – the regulations and requirements imposed by the government will be.
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“Third, the African market has matured to a point where the regulatory, mobile and demographic tailwinds are now translating into genuine, durable growth rather than early-stage promise.”
However Hjalmar Ahlberg, who covers GiG as an analyst for Redeye, suggests the decision to acquire 888Africa and re-enter B2C may be partly down to headwinds being experienced by the company’s B2B business.
“It started off pretty good when the new management and the spin-off was completed,” he comments. “They had a really good pipeline of customers, and I mean, their projections looked pretty solid.
