Kambi’s Director of Risk, David Arnold identifies five key areas in which operators must take into consideration to remain compliant and be successful in Latin America as the region continues to be a key target for global gambling groups.
Growth in Latin America is firmly in the crosshairs of every ambitious sports betting operator, and as regulation spreads local leaders and international brands alike are vying for market share.
Having a best-in-class sports betting platform and exceptional front-end experience in place is just one part of this equation. With the implementation and evolution of regulation in new and existing markets including Argentina, Brazil and Peru, a forward-thinking approach to risk and compliance is a cornerstone of long-term success.
Kambi, sportsbook partner to leading operators throughout Latin America including BetPlay, BetWarrior, KTO, Olimpo.bet and Rush Street Interactive, examines five key areas operators must have in mind when executing their sports betting strategies in the region.
Image: Kambi
The sports betting industry’s foundations are built on the trust that customers need to have in the integrity of sporting events, and those competing, if they are to place a bet on them. Any breakdown in trust would have immense implications for the long-term sustainability of the sector, and protecting sports from harm is foundational to this.
An effective integrity ecosystem and having robust sportsbook control measures in place, enabling the detection, reporting and prevention of match fixing at the earliest of stages, is critical in ensuring that this trust is maintained – thereby minimising risk to the operator and fuelling sustainable growth. Kambi has built a dedicated sportsbook control team operating 24/7, with vast experience in detecting, reporting and preventing suspicious activity. This team also maintains an in-house integrity database on teams and competitors, helping to inform the offering and ensure those events at risk of manipulation are not offered.
Healthy commercial rivalries are a hallmark of sports betting, but sports integrity is the area where collaboration and information sharing are vital. Bodies like the International Betting Integrity Association – of which Kambi was the first sports betting technology supplier to achieve membership – play an important role in the detection and escalation of integrity alerts. Underlining the quality of Kambi’s sportsbook control function, Kambi was the first member to flag suspicious events to the IBIA on 50% of occasions in 2024.
Effective liability management may not be as outwardly exciting an element of successful sportsbook delivery as having the flashiest UI or deepest range of markets, but it is one of the vital building blocks of achieving healthy sportsbook margin. Delivering compelling user experiences is paramount, and managing liability and protecting revenues is critical to doing this on a consistent, ongoing basis.
Furthermore, as the complexity of the offering expands – for example, through the expansion of Bet Builder and the addition of more combinable, and correlated selections – assessing the profitability of a bet request and its impact on liability growth becomes a challenge only the most sophisticated sportsbook risk functions have the capability to address.
Kambi demonstrated this to good effect during the Copa América, delivering a huge depth of offering for bettors – including new markets such as player shots on target and player to score from outside the box – while empowering strong financial performance for our partners. Kambi and its partners have a number of tools at their disposal to ensure that this is always the case, laying the foundations for an excellent user experience while protecting sportsbook revenues.
Unlike in casino, where every whirl of the slot machine or spin of the roulette wheel has the same odds and average return to player as any other, each sports bet and bettor brings different and varied dynamics to the table. Being able to effectively categorise customers and analyse betting activity to generate network scale insight is an important tool in the arsenal of any forward-thinking operator.
An effective risk management department will typically deploy highly sophisticated, automated forecasting models to analyse a customer’s activity, forming the backbone of the sportsbook’s relationship with that customer, for example in the offers that are marketed to them and bonuses they are offered.
The lifecycle of these bets does not come to an end when a customer’s bets are settled – Kambi makes use of powerful algorithms and in-house expertise to derive actionable insights from which all partners can benefit.
The regulatory landscape throughout Latin America continues to evolve and fragment. Regulation is coming into view in Brazil, Argentina is advancing on a province-by-province basis and Peru has signed ‘Law no 31557’ onto the statute books, regulating igaming and sports betting.
As these local requirements take shape, the demands on operators’ tech stacks intensify. To cater to this, having a platform that is capable of swiftly pivoting to meet any regulatory requirements is a cornerstone of successful delivery. No operator wants to find their ability to enter a new market delayed, or worse, abandoned, due to regulatory configurations that their underlying tech stack is incapable of reconciling.
Kambi has underlined its pedigree in the Americas throughout the last five years, facilitating first to market launches in US states including Colorado, New York and Pennsylvania, alongside rapid launch timelines in Argentina, Colombia and Peru.
Achieving high speed to market is crucial, but ensuring local compliance requirements are effectively managed on an ongoing basis is equally important. For example, there is a trend in multiple jurisdictions towards blocking particular events or markets from the offering due to concerns of betting-related manipulation.
Regulated markets including Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and multiple US states have all put in place offering restrictions in some form, be that restricting offers involving players under 18 years of age, card markets, officiating calls or simply blocking certain sports or leagues. With discussions of this nature taking place at a regulatory level in Brazil, this is set to be an increasingly relevant factor for sportsbook’s targeting Latin America.
With each of the more than 50 jurisdictions in which Kambi is live having their own, ever more varied offering templates, Kambi was in a position where hundreds of vital compliance decisions were required daily. To address these challenges, Kambi developed our Offering Compliance Automation technology – delivering a significant evolution to our filtering engine.
The tool automatically filters the offering as per local regulations, not only ensuring all compliance requirements are met (and without the need for time-consuming manual decision making on individual competitors and athletes), but also guaranteeing our partners can launch and operate with complete confidence in a full and competitive offering.
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