JUE 28 DE MARZO DE 2024 - 19:53hs.
Karen Sierra Hughes and Martin Britton

“ICE is an extremely interesting and thrilling show for GLI”

Karen Sierra-Hughes, GLI’s Director of LatAm and Caribbean Government Relations and Business Development, along with Martin Britton - Managing Director of EMEA- commented about the company’s expectations on upcoming ICE London show. “We’re very excited to present the leadership of our fully realized team that combines forces from GLI and NMi,” she said, and added about Brazil: “A solely uniform and strong regulatory body is extremely important to secure the success of gaming legalization in the country.”

GMB - Once again you are participating at ICE. What will the company showcase this year in London to the market?
Karen Sierra Hughes and Martin Britton - ICE is an extremely interesting show for us because there is so much activity and so many new products and ideas, including land-based, lottery and iGaming from all over the world. It really is a thrilling show. As you might expect, on our stand we will be talking about our expertise in testing for each of these areas at a global scale, as well as our consultancy and cybersecurity services; however, what we are maybe most excited about is to present the leadership of our fully realized team that combines the forces from GLI and NMi, now completely together under the GLI brand. Whether they are coming from Brazil or from Bulgaria, ICE attendees will recognize familiar faces, some with new titles and new roles.

Martin Britton, who is the Managing Director of EMEA, will lead our team and accompanying him will be Chris Davies, VP of Sales EMEA, GLI UK; Dr. Richard Edwards, Ph.D., Managing Director and VP of Engineering EMEA GLI UK; James Illingworth, VP of Sales EMEA, GLI Europe; and Andrew Rosewarne, Managing Director, GLI UK. This is a very positive step forward for us and for our clients worldwide because we are now in a position to support our customers even better with this combined team’s talents, experience, and capabilities. The support for the LatAm and Caribbean region will be provided by Georges Didier and myself, and we will be happy to meet again with our regulators, suppliers and operators’ clients to bring them the global expertise of GLI by bringing the world to them.

What themes or topics do you imagine will be the most relevant in this edition of this traditional expo?
iGaming is always a large part of ICE, and we expect this year to be no different. It’s important for our clients, whether they are a regulator, supplier, or operator, to understand is that everywhere iGaming is going, GLI and our GLI Digital division are already there. Whatever form iGaming takes to our clients – skill-based games, daily fantasy sports, eSports, interactive, sports betting, social gaming, geo-location, internet gaming, eLottery, security auditing, professional services, mobile, or play-for-fun – whatever that is to their business, we provide the highest quality testing and regulatory insight in all areas of iGaming. Along these same lines, wherever there is cyber business, there is the threat of cyber attacks, and we will also be talking about our industry-leading Cyber Security Services and how they provide the most sophisticated and advanced cybersecurity countermeasures to secure and protect businesses.

The online gaming sector seems not to slow down its growth before the physical ... Do you consider this trend will be deeper in 2019? Why?
Specific to Latin America and the Caribbean, we are already seeing advances. The year ended with major regulatory developments on sports betting and online gaming and advances in the region’s three major jurisdictions, including the Province of Buenos Aires, the City of Buenos Aires, and Brazil. The expectation follows for Puerto Rico which has two projects of Law pending discussion in the Legislature, and we foresee several others to follow.

Turning to Europe, iGaming has a long and successful track record in jurisdictions across the continent. So in 2019, we can expect to see an evolution of product offerings in existing jurisdictions, while at the same time, there are multiple jurisdictions where iGaming is opening. We are seeing Sweden, Greece, and Switzerland on the horizon. As an industry, we have learned that iGaming can be successfully implemented and regulated. As new markets consider opening their doors to various forms of iGaming, we can offer a great deal of insights as we have done in many locations so that lawmakers and regulators can take advantage of global best-practices and avoid past pitfalls.

What balance does the company make of 2019?
We continue to grow for the benefit of our clients. We created more bandwidth to satisfy the needs of our clients for time-to-market guaranteeing quality and accuracy. This includes our R&D efforts by continuing to develop standards and whitepapers for the benefit of the industry, along with building our standards library with GLI 33, which was very well received among our supplier and regulators clients globally, from LatAm and Caribbean to the U.S. and into EMEA. We grow our regulatory support by contributing with our policy and legislation expertise in every regulatory development effort in regions around the world. For example, in the Americas, we continue to perfect and customize our training programs, which are now available for periodic classroom sessions at our GLI Las Vegas laboratory and are open to suppliers, operators, and regulators.

Finally, our North America and LatAm Caribbean Roundtables and conferences which have been extremely successful both in turnout and the benefit that they represent for the industry. This extends to Europe and Africa, where GLI presented half-day workshops to over 200 regulators on topical subjects like loot boxes, cybersecurity, eSports, daily fantasy sports, and blockchain to demonstrate challenges being faced in the industry and provide some guidance regarding the future.

From the EMEA perspective, our ICE stand will be a personification of our growth. Our combined leadership team from GLI and the former NMi Gaming will be together, in one location, and that truly symbolizes the investment in growth we have made across EMEA in our clients’ interest. We have expanded in virtually every location in the GLI EMEA umbrella, from the Netherlands to South Africa – both in response to ever-increasing demand and to prepare for the future.

How do you see the processes of legalization and regulation in Brazil specifically? Especially after the recent legalization of sporting bets.
We are extremely excited about the legislative advances in Brazil that took place in December. It was a very thorough project that legalized land-based and online fixed-odds sports betting. We must listen to the regulators’ presentation when explaining the reasons behind the project, and how they will work to develop the regulatory structure and the licensing process that will take place. This is a critical phase, where policy objectives based on research and investigation of market potential and penetration will be crucial to determine the framework for operators, suppliers, and laboratories to comply with. The expectation is to aim for a thriving industry with a well-balanced regulation that will also allow for the supervision and control to protect the industry, the players, and the interest of the government.

Have you been contacted by companies interested in work at Brazil, after last December’s legalization?
GLI has traditionally worked with Brazilian suppliers for other markets. When referring to international suppliers and operators, there has always been interest to enter the jurisdiction and especially to make sure to only do it when a clear regulatory and licensing process is in place. We have been having these conversations over the past several years with our clients. With fixed-odds sports betting legalization, and even before, with the initiation of discussions of the gaming projects of law, there is interest from operators that are already in LatAm, and from those who have not yet entered the region, who see Brazil as a major market to start their regional penetration.

The casinos seem to be the next step in the legalization of gaming in Brazil. Do you consider that it would be correct to open the gaming market gradually or do it in a broad way with all the gaming modes at the same time?
We had worked with many jurisdictions around the world in their policy and legislative development processes, and one thing we have all learned during these endeavors is that you should learn from other countries’ experiences and best practices; but at the end, customization is crucial to achieve the policy objectives of every gaming legislation. Because the approval of legislation is always a lengthy and difficult process from the strategy and consensus standpoint, the ideal will be to establish a general framework for gaming and all its variations, with one regulatory body to avoid confusion and guarantee effectiveness of the implementation of the policies and controls.

It is extremely important that the competence and faculty is specifically and clearly given to the regulatory body, so they can establish the process of licensing and regulation of the different variations of gaming; establishing solid timeframes for the different phases including regulation, licensing, and the supervision process. We must understand that the convergence of different gaming channels, deliverables, and content is making it difficult to draw a line between land-based, iGaming, lottery, and such. This is why a solely uniform and strong regulatory body is extremely important to secure the success of any efforts to legalize the outstanding parts of the gaming industry in Brazil.

Source: Exclusive GMB