Earlier this year, the Swedish government implemented stricter restrictions on gambling companies operating with Swedish licenses. This was met with disappointment from several operators, industry experts and the Swedish online gambling authority Spelinspektionen, who worried that it would channel players to non-licensed operators instead.
Amongst other things, the restrictions included a 5,000 SEK weekly deposit limit and a maximum welcome offer of 100 SEK per licensee. According to Social Security Minister Ardalan Shekarabi, the new limits were a result of an increase in online casino activity connected to the current Covid-19 pandemic, something which was later exposed as not being true by the country’s Gambling Authority. However, after some changes to the original proposal, the restrictions were implemented on July 2nd, 2020.
We spoke to Jacob Ljunggren, Product Director at Leadstar Media about the effect it has had on the affiliate company in the past couple of months.
Can you tell us how these changes have affected you?
– Sweden has historically been our most important market; that’s where we started our first site. However, in the past few years, we have grown as a company and expanded outside of Sweden to several other markets. We are no longer as dependent on Sweden as we once were, luckily. Of course, we still have Swedish facing products that have seen some changes, specifically our bonus comparison site Oddsbonusar.se. The purpose of this site is to compare bonuses, and now all bonuses are more or less the same.
How did you adapt to the new regulations?
– The restrictions that were implemented required us to update all of the bonus offers from our partners. We have also had to focus our bookmaker comparisons on factors other than their bonuses. For example, we evaluate the markets, payment methods, features and odds of different betting sites. This is something we’ve always done, but I believe it has become much more of a contributing factor now when bonuses don’t appeal to players as much.
How do you think the future looks for Sweden and have you made any major changes to your long-term strategy?
– It’s important to remember that these limits are only temporary, at least that’s what has been communicated so far. The iGaming industry is constantly moving, and there are always things that change and things that you can improve on with any site. Call me an optimist, but I think this will all be over eventually so I don’t think the best strategy would be to make any major changes that we wouldn’t have otherwise done. With that being said, we are constantly changing and updating our sites in all of our markets to put us in, what we believe, is the best position to succeed in the long term.
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