The segregated online markets in Europe are working towards a player sharing agreement and making significant progress, Daria Petralia, Head of Online Gaming at Italy’s gambling regulator said at a recent gambling conference.
Speaking at the conference at the Polytechnic University of Milan, Petralia said that discussions have been ongoing on a regulatory platform for shared liquidity. He also said Italy’s regulatory body will present an analysis of shared liquidity in May and a regulatory framework. The markets in the talks include Spain, Portugal, France and the UK.
Italy’s online gambling industry generated €1.03 billion last year, a 25 percent increase over 2015. was generated last year by licensed online gambling operators, up 25% year-on-year. That growth has made Italy Europe’s second largest online market, according to figures released by the country’s Online Gaming Observatory.
However, online poker—which suffers by the ring-fencing of markets that limit player pools—fell by five percent.
Portugal’s gambling regulator submitted a technical standards framework to the European Commission on shared player liquidity in November, which has now been approved by the commission. The move allows Portugal to seek agreements with other markets, according to local media reports.
Also, in what is being called an industry first, European online sites Win2day and Veikkhaus have successfully combined online poker player liquidity between Austria and Finland. The two respective sites combined under Playtech’s poker platform.
Win2day, owned by the Austrian Lotteries and Casinos Austria, and Veikkhaus, the new brand controlled by the Finnish Slot Machine Association, both recently announced that they had completed the project of combining the player pools of their two online poker rooms, according to Poker Industry PRO.
“The Finns are here!” read an announcement on the Win2day site. “We are now combining poker forces with the state-licensed Veikkhaus from Finland. This is the start of the first cross-border, regulated online poker network.”
Playtech has provides online poker software to Ray, which consolidated its online gaming offer under the single Veikkhaus brand. Last year, Win2day also moved to the Playtech platform.
Veikkhaus received approval from Finnish authorities for the player-sharing agreement in December, the website said.
