Trust in the Game: Integrity in Sports Betting

As per tradition, the seminar was organised alongside a high-profile international sporting event. This year, participants had the opportunity to attend the UEFA Europa League Final, with a crowd of 37,500 fans filling the Beşiktaş stadium. 

As football is the single largest driver of the global betting market, this event served as a powerful reminder of how closely sport, integrity, and regulation are intertwined, and of the responsibility that the regulated sector carries in protecting both.

A global market overview by Christian KALB, Managing Director, CK Consulting, France highlighted that sports betting remains the fastest-growing segment of the gambling market, driven by online and live betting, while newly regulated markets continue to expand the legal market worldwide.

It was also stressed that regulated operators must compete not only on compliance, but on delivering attractive and seamless customer experiences that encourage players to remain within the legal market. A complementary perspective came from Bally's Intralot, whose product experts argued that the regulated sector must compete on experience, not labels. As they put it: "No customer wakes up in the morning thinking, 'today I want a regulated betting experience.' They think, 'I want the best experience I can get.'"

Their message was clear: regulation should be a competitive advantage, not a limitation. By combining trust and player protection with seamless customer experiences, lotteries can strengthen the appeal of the legal market.

AML: Protecting the Integrity of Financial Flows

The seminar showcased AML best practices from Europe and Asia. Case studies from Svenska Spel, Sisal and the Hong Kong Jockey Club demonstrated how customer identification, transaction monitoring and risk-based controls help prevent financial crime while supporting responsible play. Discussions highlighted the need for continued cooperation between operators, regulators, payment providers and law-enforcement authorities to address increasingly sophisticated risks.

Innovation and AI Reshape the Market

Participants explored how technological innovation is transforming sports betting. Topics included the rise of platform ecosystems, prediction markets and AI-driven services. Speakers highlighted both the opportunities and challenges created by AI, emphasising the importance of strong governance and human oversight as new tools become increasingly embedded in products, operations and decision-making.

Christian Kalb (CK Consulting, France) returned to trace the path from sportsbooks to super-platforms, mapping fifteen years of mergers and acquisitions and the rise of prediction markets as the sector's newest disruption. He drew a direct parallel with the arrival of new operators in the lottery world 25 years ago — "history repeats itself" — and urged the sector to engage regulators, work through the Council of Europe, and respond with its own innovation rather than ceding the ground.

Cristiano Cinotti (Sisal, Italy) shared the story of MyCombo, showing how regulatory complexity can be turned into market leadership. By involving the regulator early, building a cross-functional team and investing in extensive testing, Sisal launched a personalised combination-bet product fully within Italy's strict rules, proof that a demanding regulatory environment can become a source of competitive advantage rather than a constraint.

Nicoló D'Ercole (Sportradar) and Fred Palley (OpenBet) turned to the question of how AI is reshaping sports betting. Nicoló showed how AI is already driving targeted advertising, multimodal content at scale, automatic and personalised betting offers, and AI-driven interfaces. Fred offered a complementary, more cautionary perspective: the AI landscape is fragmenting rather than consolidating — with no single tool winning everywhere — making a governed, deliberately architected AI stack essential. 

Drawing the Lines Against Illegal Betting

This session examined new approaches to measuring the scale of illegal online gambling, the role of the CoE’s Macolin Convention, and operational strategies used in Uruguay and Morocco to disrupt unlicensed operators. Prof. Stefano Caneppele (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) presented preliminary results from the WLA/UNIL pilot project developing a scalable, transparent methodology to estimate the size of the illegal online gambling market. 

Nicolas Sayde (Council of Europe) made the case for the Macolin Convention as the only international treaty fully dedicated to the manipulation of sports competitions and the only one offering a clear, shared definition of illegal betting. 

Fabián García (La Banca, Uruguay) presented Uruguay's new strategies against illegal operators, built on the combination of site blocking, financial blocking and an advertising prohibition within a state-monopoly model. He described how the sector is now using AI and social-media mapping to track the cashiers, influencers, and intermediaries behind the illegal offer, and why treating its promotion as a predicate offence matters.

Ali El Kadiri Hani (MDJS, Morocco) shared the Moroccan operational model, a five-lever system spanning sponsorship, legal, and digital action, platform blocking, institutional mobilisation and media pressure — taking the fight, in his words, "from detection to disruption." Among the results: since October 2025 the national championship has been played without a single illegal operator in its stadiums. He also detailed the real-time integrity monitoring system deployed for AFCON 2025, an internationally coordinated effort which assessed the tournament's integrity risk as low to controlled with no confirmed case of manipulation.