SBC Summit Europe: Where Will European Gaming Growth Come From Next?

SBC Summit Europe | 19-21 April 2027 | RAI Amsterdam

Europe, taken as a whole, is home to some of the world’s most mature land-based and online gambling markets. From the opening of Venice’s Ridotto, one of the world’s earliest public casinos, to Malta’s creation of one of Europe’s first online licensing regimes in 2004, the region has a rich history and a highly developed market, with estimates putting its GGR at €123.4 billion in 2024.

But just because the region has a rich history and a valuable market does not mean the routes to growth are closed.

SBC Summit Europe is designed to explore these routes to growth, whether it be markets like Finland, which are set to open to private operators, or established gambling economies where further digitalisation could move more existing activity online.

Elsewhere, the opportunity looks different again. In Europe’s most mature online markets, growth may come from operators taking market share, improving retention and developing more personalised products, while better channelisation could bring a greater share of existing gambling activity into the regulated market.

New products and formats, including the emergence of prediction markets, could create further opportunities, while operators looking to expand across borders still face the challenge of building brands that resonate with local players.

In this blog, we’ll look at the different opportunities present in Europe, and how companies can explore them. 

New Regulation Can Bring Existing Demand Into the Licensed Market

Finland provides one of the clearest examples of how regulatory change can create a new commercial opportunity without necessarily creating new gambling demand.

The country is preparing to move away from the monopoly model that has historically given Veikkaus control over much of the gambling market.

From 1 July 2027, Finland will open betting, online slots, online casino and online bingo to licensed competition.

That creates an obvious opportunity for international operators, but the underlying growth story is more nuanced than simply adding a new regulated market to the European map.

Finns already gamble online, but a significant share of that activity currently takes place outside the domestic system.

Finland’s channelisation rate across digital gambling has been estimated at roughly 50%, down from around 90% a decade ago. If those estimates are accurate, around half of the country’s online gambling activity is currently taking place outside the regulated Finnish market.

With a ready and willing audience already gambling online, albeit through operators outside Finland’s domestic regulated system, Finland’s upcoming regulation represents an opportunity to enter a market where significant demand already exists.

For operators, the growth opportunity is therefore not dependent on creating new gambling habits. Instead, it comes from competing for existing players and bringing a greater share of their activity into the newly licensed market.

Some Markets Still Have Much Further to Digitise

Not every growth opportunity requires a regulatory reset.

Europe is still a long way from being a fully digital gambling market. Online accounted for around 39% of European gambling GGR in 2024 and is projected to reach 45% by 2029, according to EGBA’s market forecasts.

That overall figure also hides significant differences between individual countries.

In 2023, online gambling accounted for just 21.7% of GGR in Italy and 14.2% in Spain, compared with more than two-thirds of the market in Sweden, Denmark and Finland. EGBA’s country breakdown shows just how wide that digital gap remains.

That creates another form of growth.

Italy does not need millions of people to suddenly discover gambling for its online sector to expand. Existing activity can continue moving from betting shops, gaming halls and other retail channels towards mobile and desktop.

Operators are already betting on that transition. When Flutter announced its acquisition of Snai, it highlighted Italy’s relatively low online penetration as one of the market’s main attractions and said it expected greater digital adoption to support strong online growth. Flutter’s Snai acquisition rationale

For markets such as Italy and Spain, the next growth phase may therefore be less about uncovering new demand and more about digitising demand that is already there.

Product Innovation Can Create Growth for Existing Operators

Just because a market is mature does not mean that there is no room to grow.

Take Great Britain, one of Europe’s most established iGaming markets. Between April 2025 and March 2026, the country’s remote casino, betting and bingo sector generated £8.3 billion in GGY, up 6.9% year-on-year.

Growth was particularly strong in online casino, where GGY reached £5.7 billion. Casino alone generated more than twice the GGY of remote betting, which stood at £2.4 billion.

So how can mature markets continue to grow? Part of the answer may lie in the products and experiences operators offer players.

Crash games, for example, offer a fresh alternative to traditional slot games. Originating from the world of crypto casinos, crash games typically centre on a multiplier that rises continuously once a round begins. Players must choose when to cash out, with their potential winnings increasing the longer they wait. If the game “crashes” before they exit, they lose their stake.

The format is simple, fast-paced and built around the tension of deciding how long to stay in each round. Titles such as Spribe’s Aviator, winner of Crash Game of the Year at the 2026 SBC Awards, have helped take crash games from a relatively niche format into mainstream online casino lobbies, while major suppliers have since launched their own variations.

Online casino is also borrowing more heavily from the gamification techniques used across traditional video games. Rather than treating each casino session as a series of isolated spins, operators can build wider journeys around missions, campaigns, achievements, leaderboards, levels and rewards.

These mechanics give players objectives beyond the outcome of an individual game. A player might complete a series of challenges over several days, unlock an achievement for reaching a milestone or progress through a campaign that spans multiple casino products. In that sense, the experience becomes closer to the progression systems familiar from games such as Call of Duty, where completing objectives and unlocking rewards gives players an additional reason to return.

Another area where growth is possible is in live dealer formats for games such as blackjack and roulette. Rather than simply recreating the experience of a physical casino online, suppliers are increasingly adding game-show elements, multipliers, bonus rounds and more elaborate studio production to make live casino more interactive and entertainment-led.

For operators, these developments provide new ways to generate growth from an established casino audience. Instead of relying solely on attracting more players, they can broaden the product mix and create new ways for existing customers to engage with casinos.

Could Prediction Markets Come to Europe?

Prediction markets have rapidly moved into the mainstream in the US.

In July 2026, Kalshi and Polymarket generated a combined $53 billion in monthly trading volume, more than double the $26 billion recorded just two months earlier. Kalshi accounted for around $40.1 billion of that July total, while Polymarket and its US platform generated roughly $12.9 billion. 

That growth has also attracted some of the biggest names in traditional US sports betting. FanDuel launched FanDuel Predicts in December 2025, giving users access to sports, financial and cultural event contracts, while DraftKings launched its own prediction-market exchange, DKeX, in June 2026. DraftKings said its Predictions product was already generating approximately $3.4 billion in annualised consumer volume at the time of the launch.

The question for Europe is whether that success can be replicated.

In Great Britain, the Gambling Commission has said prediction-market products that meet the statutory definition of gambling must be licensed, with many current models likely to fall within existing betting regulation. The regulator outlined its position in February 2026.

Elsewhere, the path is less straightforward. France has treated platforms such as Polymarket as unauthorised gambling, demonstrating how differently the product could be received across Europe’s fragmented regulatory landscape.

Prediction markets may therefore offer another route to product-led growth, but probably not through a single European model. As with much of European iGaming, the opportunity will depend on how individual markets choose to classify and regulate the product.

Growth Does Not Always Mean a Bigger Market

There is another way for operators to grow in an established market: taking a larger share of it.

When the overall market is only expanding gradually, individual businesses can still outperform by winning customers from competitors, improving retention and getting more from their existing customer relationships.

Entain provides a useful case study of how this can work in practice.

The operator estimated that the underlying UK online gambling market grew by around 3% in 2025, while its own UK and Ireland online NGR increased by 15%, with the company pointing to further market-share gains and stronger customer volumes.

In other words, Entain did not need the wider market to grow at the same pace as its own business. It grew by capturing a greater share of the opportunity already available.

Retention becomes particularly important in that environment. In its 2025 annual report, Entain describes retaining existing customers as being as important as acquiring new ones.

That also puts greater emphasis on CRM. Understanding customer behaviour allows operators to communicate with different groups more effectively, make promotions more relevant and build longer-term relationships rather than relying continually on expensive new customer acquisition.

For Europe’s mature markets, this changes the definition of growth. It is not always about the total market becoming significantly larger. For individual operators, growth can mean taking market share, reducing churn and extracting more value from the customer relationships they already have.

Better Channelisation Can Grow the Regulated Market

Growth does not always depend on people gambling more. It can also come from bringing a greater share of existing gambling activity into the regulated market.

That is where channelisation matters: the proportion of gambling taking place with licensed operators rather than unlicensed ones. Growth in the overall market and growth in the regulated market are not necessarily the same thing. Even if total demand remains flat, licensed operators can still grow if more players move away from offshore sites and towards regulated alternatives.

Germany shows the scale of that opportunity. A study commissioned by the country’s gambling regulator, the GGL estimated that 77.03% of Germany’s online gambling market was channelled through regulated operators in 2024, leaving 22.97% with unlicensed providers.

For the regulated sector, that represents a sizeable pool of existing gambling activity that does not need to be created. The opportunity is to bring more of it inside the licensed market.

Achieving that is harder than it sounds. Enforcement against illegal operators plays a role, but so can the design of the regulated market itself. Licensed products need to meet consumer-protection requirements while remaining attractive enough for players to choose them over unlicensed alternatives.

Finland faces a similar challenge. One aim of opening parts of its market to licensed competition is to bring more online gambling activity inside the regulated system.

The gambling is already happening. The growth opportunity lies in bringing more of it onto the licensed side.

Localisation Can Turn Market Access Into Market Share

Entering a market is one thing. Building a sustainable position within it is another.

For operators expanding across Europe, localisation can therefore become another important route to growth.

That means more than translating a website or offering customer support in the local language. Operators also need to understand how people in each market actually gamble, which products they favour, how they deposit and withdraw money, which sports and competitions matter most, and which brands they already trust.

Flutter’s acquisition of Snai in Italy provides a useful example of how to grow market share. When the company acquired Snai, it highlighted the operator’s 74% brand awareness, extensive retail presence and strong position across both online and land-based gambling. Flutter also noted that customers using both Snai’s retail and online channels were more loyal, more active and generated more revenue per player than online-only customers.

For an international operator, that kind of local recognition is difficult to recreate simply by launching another global brand into the market.

The same principle can be seen in how operators adapt their brands across different countries. Kaizen Gaming, for example, operates Stoiximan in Greece and Cyprus (where the brand sponsors the Greek football first division), while using Betano across many of its other markets. Even within a global sponsorship agreement with UEFA, Stoiximan is the brand shown specifically in Greece and Cyprus – whereas Betano is used in markets where it is well known, such as Portugal.

Additionally, good localisation involves catering to the tastes of players. Features such as accumulators and early-payout offers have become familiar parts of the UK sportsbook proposition, with competing operators often developing variations on similar mechanics. These features reflect an understanding of local customer preferences and can give players additional reasons to remain engaged with a particular sportsbook.

Localisation can also extend to the sports and products an operator chooses to prioritise.

Padel provides a good example. The sport has a particularly strong following in Southern Europe, with Spain accounting for 28.7% of players across the Premier Padel and CUPRA FIP circuits in the first half of 2025, while Portugal accounted for another 4.5%.

Sportsbooks can respond to those local interests by making events that matter in individual markets more prominent. Betsson, for example, offers dedicated betting markets across the Premier Padel tour.

It is a relatively small example, but it illustrates the wider point: localisation is not just about translating an international sportsbook. It also means understanding which sports, competitions and products are most relevant to customers in each market and building the proposition around them.

So Where Will European Gaming Growth Come From Next?

Europe’s maturity does not mean the growth has dried up. It means it looks different in each market.

In Finland, regulation is opening the door for licensed operators to compete for demand that already exists. In Italy and Spain, more existing activity can still move online. In established markets, operators can grow by winning share, retaining players and sharpening their products, while better channelisation can enlarge the regulated market without anyone needing to gamble more. Localisation then helps decide who benefits once they are in.

There is no single answer. The opportunity differs from country to country, and the challenge for operators, suppliers and investors is working out which kind is on offer in each market and what it takes to capture it.

SBC Summit Europe, taking place on 19–21 April 2027 at RAI Amsterdam, will bring the industry together to compare those opportunities and ask where the next phase of growth lies.