Outgoing KSA Chair outlines state of Dutch gambling industry

The Chair of the Netherlands Gaming Authority has penned a new blog post on the regulator’s website in which he spoke about the current state of the Dutch gambling industry and how far the market has come since it was launched in October 2021.

René Jansen, who is due to step down in July 2024, has spoken about the state of licensing in the Netherlands, making a prediction that the pace of applications is going to decline further in the new year.

He bases his surmise on the empirical evidence from 2023 which already suggests that much fewer licenses are actually making a play for the local market. Jansen has described this as a sort of "maturity" where the rapid growth spurs of the early days are now slowing down and unlikely to return.

Although the market saw a huge influx of licensees, the companies that want to break ground may have already done so. In many ways, this makes sense, as other mature markets have demonstrated that in the conditions of tight advertisement safeguards, pushing a new brand through to the end customer can be a momentous if not impossible task.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, believes Jansen. The companies that could not break ground were not rejected merely because the regulator wanted to keep the market tightly controlled by certain parties, but rather because they simply failed to meet some basic criteria when it comes to consumer safeguards.

The focus in the market will now change from companies vying to gain entry to companies looking to consolidate their local presence, Jansen posited, looking at current trends. Although a relatively young market, companies will be fighting hard to ensure they hold a bigger market share moving forward.

In the meantime, the KSA has been keeping its regulatory game up to scratch. Apart from passing a number of safeguards over the past years to ensure that vulnerable consumers are always protected, the regulator’s newest efforts have focused on a new enforcing policy for physical illegal games of chance.

The regulator has also been targeting individual brands that it believes are encroaching on the regulated market territory by using a Dutch-tailored offering. Most of these challenges have been refuted by otherwise reputable brands which accused the KSA of using means of accessing their websites that were not good or fair practices to begin with.

Image credit: Unsplash.com