Regulation round-up 30 June 2015
The biggest regulatory news from the egaming industry in the last seven days (24 June to 30 June 2015)
William Hill withdraws from Portugal and Estonia
Operator tells affiliates it will no longer accept business from players within the two countries
William Hill has withdrawn from Portugal and Estonia due to “recent regulatory developments”, however the operator has left the door open to a possible return.
The operator, which prefers to keep its unregulated market exposure to a minimum, emailed affiliates last week to inform them of the decision and confirmed to eGaming Review that none of its products would be available within the countries’ borders from Sunday 28 June.
Affiliates have been asked to remove all marketing materials from their websites, including banners and text links, which relate to Estonian and Portuguese bettors.
The withdrawal from Portugal will come just one day ahead of the planned release of the country’s draft online gambling regulation while Estonia’s framework has been live since 2010.
Gambling Commission open to auto-play alternatives
Great Britain’s Gambling Commission is giving operators the chance to pitch alternatives to planned auto-play restrictions while also extending the implementation deadline for a number of remote technical standards (RTS) requirements.
Amendments to the RTS will now come into force on two separate dates, with changes to auto-play functionality, loss limits and customer checks pushed back from its originally scheduled date of 31 October 2015 to 30 April 2016.
However, amendments to financial limits, automatic self-exclusion and time-out facilities will go ahead as planned at the end of October.
Seven days in regulation:
Portuguese regulator reveals licensing details
Applications for Portuguese online gambling licences are unlikely to be accepted before September, according to new details on the licensing process released by Turismo de Portugal, the government body overseeing Portugal’s upcoming online gambling regulation.
The regulator moved to clarify the licensing process just days before its implementation, as despite the country’s new regulatory framework having entered into law in April, a number of uncertainties continue to linger over a procedure which went live on 29 June.
Among the clarifications made at a special meeting held last week, Turismo de Portugal confirmed that there will be no limit on the number of licences issued and that licences will be split into four categories: casino games fixed odds sports bets, mutual and fixed odds horse racing betting and bingo.
PKR withdraws from “unviable” French poker market
PKR has withdrawn from the “unviable” French online poker market in order to focus on growing its dot.com business, the poker operator told eGR.
The firm said the regulated French market had been far from a success to date and hoped for the sake of players that “a better solution will eventually be found”.
“France was an underperforming area which sadly had to be closed so that we could focus our resources on growing our primary gaming business,” a PKR spokesman told eGR.
Pre-PoC yield in Britain up 27%, new figures show
Gross gaming yield (GGY) for operators licensed by Great Britain’s Gambling Commission rose 27% year-on year for the 12 months before Point of Consumption regulation kicked, provisional figures released by the regulator have shown.
Total online GGY for the year ended September 2014 totalled £1.35bn, an increase on the £1.06bn recorded during the previous 12 months, with the overwhelming majority derived from sports betting, which grew 35% to £1.19bn.
The rise meant that the remote gambling industry contributed 19% of total GGY for the gambling industry as a whole, excluding the National Lottery, up from 16% during the previous period.
Portuguese market not viable, says PKR
PKR has withdrawn its real-money offering from Portugal and will not apply for a licence in the re-regulating country due to concerns over its commercial viability.
Portugal’s new licensing and regulatory framework went live yesterday, with a number of operators such as William Hill withdrawing from the market ahead of a licensing process planned for later this year.
However, a PKR spokesman told eGR the operator had no plans to apply for a Portuguese licence as “the numbers just don’t stack up”.
Germany’s Green Party slams “arbitrary” licensing framework
Germany’s opposition Green Party has criticised the country’s regulatory framework and called for wide-ranging change, including the removal of the 20-licence cap.
In a statement the party said it was of the opinion that access to the sports betting market should be “linked to qualitative conditions and not an arbitrarily set number of bookmakers” who receive concessions.
“The limitation of the concessions to 20 vendors for us was never obvious,” Jürgen Frömmrich, home affairs spokesman of the Greens said.