REGULATION


Navigating the new rules:


Gaming Internation Online speaks to Kate Chambers, founder of The Gaming Boardroom who has been helping gambling industry leaders achieve strategic clarity and growth for over 20 years, about the latest rules and regulations surrounding iGaming and asks for her advice on how operators can best keep up and navigate them.


GIO: Licensing requirements seem to be shifting almost constantly. How are operators keeping up? Kate Chambers: The pace of change really has accelerated over the last couple of years. What we’re seeing is a wave of markets either opening up for the first time or significantly overhauling their existing frameworks.


Brazil launched a fully regulated gambling market at the start of 2025, Italy has just run a new licensing tender with tougher technical standards, and Finland is opening its online market for the first time. Meanwhile, established markets like the Netherlands and Germany are tightening their grip. The Netherlands raised its gross gaming revenue tax from 30.5% to 34.2% at the start of 2026, with a further increase to 37.8% already in the pipeline.


For operators, this isn’t just about keeping a legal checklist up to date. These changes reshape commercial strategy. Higher tax rates in mature markets are pushing operators to look harder at emerging opportunities, while stricter KYC and identity verification requirements (Germany now mandates full player verification before a single deposit can be made) mean that compliance has to be embedded into the product experience from day one, not bolted on afterwards.


GIO: What are the biggest operational headaches when you’re running across multiple jurisdictions? KC: Fragmentation is the honest answer. Imagine you’re an operator licensed in six or seven markets simultaneously. You’re dealing with six or seven different sets of technical standards, responsible gambling tools, AML reporting obligations, and advertising rules, often managed by regulators who have little interest in speaking to each other. Each licence renewal, each audit, each regulatory update requires dedicated attention. The cost burden is also frequently


a conversation on gambling regulation


underestimated. Beyond the headline licensing fees (which can run to several hundred thousand pounds in some markets) there are ongoing costs for legal counsel, technical audits, RNG certification, local entity incorporation, and compliance technology. A modern multi-jurisdiction operation needs sophisticated real-time transaction monitoring, secure data handling, and identity verification infrastructure that can flex across different legal definitions of what “verification” even means. The talent question is just as pressing. Regulatory compliance expertise is genuinely scarce, and the operators who manage multi-jurisdiction portfolios well tend to have invested heavily in in-house legal and compliance teams rather than relying entirely on external advisers.


GIO: Looking out three to five years, are regulators getting closer together or further apart? KC: Both, and that’s not a cop-out. There are genuine signs of convergence in Europe. The EU’s Anti-Money Laundering Regulation became applicable in mid-2026 and is creating a new baseline across member states. Regulators are sharing information more effectively, and we’re seeing quiet harmonisation on things like affordability checks and technical standards, even without a single EU-wide gambling law. That matters operationally because it’s becoming much harder for operators to exploit regulatory gaps between jurisdictions.


Outside Europe, the picture is more fractured. Across Asia, regulatory asymmetry creates governance gaps that bad actors are quick to exploit. Emerging markets in Latin America and Africa offer enormous growth potential, but they come with currency volatility, infrastructure gaps, and regulatory frameworks that are still finding their feet. Brazil is the obvious example. Regulators have been moving at pace, but the rules keep evolving, and an operator who built their entire market entry strategy on 2024’s framework has had to adapt quickly.


My honest read is this: regulatory convergence is the direction of travel, but it’s a slow journey. In the near term, operators need to treat each market as genuinely distinct, invest in compliance infrastructure that can scale, and build relationships with regulators rather than just ticking boxes.


The operators doing that well right now are the ones who will be best positioned when the rules eventually do align.


34 JUNE 2026 GIO


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