People person: Corinne Valletta, Betsson

Simon Planzer: What has kept you busy this year?

Corinne Valletta: From a business perspective, there are lots of priorities, but growth is high on the agenda. If you look across the entire group, we’re expanding quite ambitiously, especially in South America, and we have around 20 licenses within Europe. So there’s quite a lot going on. How that affects me as Betsson General Counsel may not be what you are expecting because my biggest challenges are around people. A big part of my job is making sure that I have the right team in place to cope with that growth, and that has been very intense. The team has grown to around 60 people, which makes sense when you consider how many jurisdictions we have to cover, but in a place like Malta where we are based, that is quite large.

Simon Planzer: Malta is known as a global gaming hub but are there currently enough qualified people locally to meet business needs?

CV: Malta is a gaming hub, at least in Europe, and as a result, you’ve got really quite a strong ecosystem supplying what is needed to make a gaming business successful. And that includes the sorts of employees you need. And not only Maltese. You have game marketing people, you have gaming law people, you have gaming tech people, and product people from all over the world. If they’re in gaming, they know that at some point they need to be in Malta. But each year, new companies set up here too, and that means there is a lot of competition for the right people. It has become a constant drive to have the best conditions, the best benefits, and the best packages, including competitive salaries. You’ve got a lot of startups and small companies aside from the larger ones like Betsson, and small companies can be very aggressive with very high salary budgets since they set up smaller teams. When you have a team of 50 or 60, you cannot pay them all high-tier salaries, it’s unsustainable. But we are competing with those companies, which makes it hard to attract the right people and keep them.

SP: Once you have recruited the team, what are the challenges then?

CV: Then it’s about setting them up with the right tools and strategies to get the work done properly. We have to have people from different countries owing to the language requirements of our various licensing jurisdictions, which means you have a melting pot of lots of different cultures and characters. Then I am managing people with very different career backgrounds to me. There are so many different skill sets required even just within the legal and compliance team. There are all areas of law, from regulatory to commercial, and corporate to M&A, as well as litigation and banking. Then there are people with a background in technical audits and data, security, business, or general compliance. It is really challenging when you’re the boss and you have no academic qualifications in some of the areas you are managing – it means you need to constantly test to make sure you have found the right people to help you arrive at the solutions the business needs.

SP: You mentioned having to be across lots of different aspects of law. That’s a huge brief when you’re in so many countries, especially in Latin America.

CV: It’s not even the law itself but the speed at which things change. Practically every day something changes somewhere that affects the plans or operations of the business. Management expectations are that we can give an immediate interpretation, which would be unheard of outside our industry. We are expected to be on top of regulatory developments in real time. So there’s a new framework being introduced in Brazil at the moment, and the team is working through it to understand and provide its interpretation on how we can implement it. The business is only interested in how long that is going to take, and one needs to appreciate that we are not the regulator, we are only interpreting the law. So what we understand and explain may not necessarily be exactly what the regulator intended: we will only know with time. Things change so quickly, and always the question is ‘how does this affect our position,’ and you’re expected to give an answer.

SP: Many IMGL members provide external counsel to people in your in-house position. Do you rely on third-party counsel and what can they do to support you better?

CV: External counsel means different things in different markets. In markets where we don’t have a local license, they are the only way to get representation with the regulator. But in many cases, they are a sounding board. I talk through ideas and try to understand whether we are on the right track, especially with difficult decisions. I am happy with most of the support we get, although sometimes it feels like they take on too much and can’t be as quick as we need them to be. One week for a legal opinion is too slow: the business reality is much quicker than that.

SP: You mentioned your expansion in LatAm. That feels quite a long way away from Betsson’s ownership roots in Scandinavia. How did that come about?

CV: : South America is interesting for us because we have had good success in the early days and achieved some strong brand recognition. We acquired a company in Brazil in 2019 and another in Colombia in 2020. The recent law in Peru is very interesting for us, and we have been closely following the developments there. Argentina started to open up in 2018, and now we have three licenses there.

From a legal and compliance perspective, the challenges in South America are numerous. Regulators are often younger and sometimes more prepared to listen, but sometimes they have old school legal frameworks and lots of ex ante regulation, extremely prescriptive rules on financial reporting, AML reporting, and lots of demands on operators. Regulations are often so complex that it’s hard to achieve compliance efficiently, which can damage the relationship locally. Culturally, it’s challenging too, making sure that even though we are in Malta we are speaking the same language and things don’t get lost in translation.

Peru has been a priority this year. We have tech and product teams working around the clock to make sure we’re ready to go live when we get the regulatory and compliance piece complete. Brazil is about to start in earnest as the window is open to apply for licenses there, and so it starts again.

SP: You have followed quite different market entry strategies, with acquisitions, partnerships and your own standalone B2C operations. How do you assess that mixed approach?

CV: We used to favour acquisitions, but forming partnerships is a strategy we have adopted for a few years now. We find it advantageous to retain the local knowledge, and it helps us gain a stronger foothold in a shorter time. In Brazil, that partnership is still active, and they are actively involved in the business. In Argentina, we need to have a land-based local partner under the regulations. We formed this partnership some years ago – they [the partner] run the land-based operation while we focus on the online part of the business.

When regulation started in South America, we thought it would be effectively a copy paste of the regulations in Spain, but it turned out to be very different country by country, so there’s no possibility of cookie cutter. There are quite a few considerations for each country: which brand are we entering with, our flagship brand Betsson or a local brand that we’re acquiring? Which platform are we going to use – we have our own platform, will we use that? If we are using our platform, we may have to reshape it to accommodate a new brand. We do consider 3rd-party platforms where the brand we are acquiring is working well, but that brings lots of legal complexity. When you add another party to the mix, you have the responsibility for the license on a platform that may not be able to deliver what you need. At the end of the day, you have to have the right mix of elements to be successful in whatever regime you are going into.

SP: We have a regulatory patchwork even in Europe, in spite of its comparatively small size and the existence of a European Union. How do you manage licenses in over 20 countries? And is there a pathway towards greater regulatory harmonization?

CV: I started in gaming about 15 years ago when harmonisation was already mentioned but was almost immediately shut down following the developments in European courts and then the other institutions. During those times, we thought – well, if harmonization can’t happen, then at least we should aim for some standardization. But even then, when we spoke about the idea of harmonisation and standardisation and the havoc it would wreak if it were not adopted, we couldn’t possibly imagine the situation we are in now. Today it’s so much worse than we thought it would be and so difficult and expensive to be compliant. Everyone is regulating differently, maybe not completely, but differently enough. And we don’t only have Europe – we have the US, Canada, Africa, LatAm. So you have to come up with a different way of complying each time, supported by a focused compliance team, and a different product. We have to spend hours convincing product teams that we cannot do in Brazil what we are doing in Argentina, for example, that the way they are supervising in this country is different from somewhere else, and being compliant will have different outcomes for the product.

I have resigned myself to the fact that we just have to deal with it in the best way we can, which comes back to where we started. It is about getting the team, in place, but that means sustainability becomes a question as the team has to be large. The only way to justify it is if that market is profitable enough. If it’s too expensive to comply, considering everything, we have to exit those markets. To be sustainable you need to be very big and very aggressive or you have to go down a different route. As we know, there are operators out there who simply ignore the regulatory frameworks. We are compliant, but there are some who stay under the radar and are doing very well. The black market is huge, and this is who we are competing with in regulated markets.

SP: How do you explain that the unlicensed offers are so successful if they are not allowed to communicate commercially?

CV: This is the point. As Betsson, this is our mantra: to be a sustainable business, we must hold licences in the relevant jurisdictions where they are available; otherwise we cannot promote ourselves or operate there. But it is not the case for everyone – some operators thrive in the black market, continue to operate without getting caught by regulation. The enforcement mechanisms available and the network of regulators are perhaps not strong enough to tackle the black market. It is all very well to keep adding new rules and new restrictions, but when you are only covering operators who you license, not the illegal operators, you must question what you are doing wrong.

SP: We have seen some companies fined over the behaviour of subsidiary companies pre acquisition. How do you as General Counsel limit or mitigate against those skeletons in the cupboard?

CV: You have to know what you’re buying. You should be able to spot legacy risks when you see a regulator is investigating, and you may have to pay up, for example. There is usually very little you can do to minimize the risk, but you may be able to negotiate with the vendor around some limitation of liability. Sometimes you just have to accept it as a cost of doing business and we have done a mix of both, which factors into the price.

I am not normally directly involved with acquisitions at the earlier stages. When they do land on my desk, the first thing I do is a thorough operations check on structures, reporting, etc. to see if we have to restructure or make other adjustments. There is always a focus on keeping up the ROI, so that can’t be thrown out. The only way I find to make it work is to put in place controls to make sure the reporting lines are right in the organisation. It’s not immediately possible, but you need to do it over time. We have been able to explain to regulators that we recognise a business needed to change, and this is what we’re doing to fix it. With the more reasonable ones you usually get somewhere, and they accept things have changed now you have taken full control. It doesn’t always go your way, however, and at the end of the day the regulator wants somebody to answer for failures that happened under people who are no longer around. Usually, you are buying the company because you want the license, so it’s the acquirer that needs to answer for it.

SP: We have talked a lot about the challenges of working in the industry in the position you have. What would you say to young lawyers to encourage them to get into gaming?

CV: I think it’s definitely the place to be if you want variety. There’s always something new. I mean, I come to that to work every morning, I look at the news to see if there are some things I need to follow, and there’s always something new. The world is a very big place and gaming is a very new area. Gaming law is still new and constantly changing so there is a huge amount still to learn. And it’s an area where you have the opportunity actually to use your knowledge of the different areas of law. One day I’m discussing civil claims, another day I’m discussing an administrative decision by a regulator that I don’t agree with. Another day we are talking about rolling out a new product in a new market. No day is the same. You can be an M&A lawyer, you could be a tech lawyer and be interested in the products, you could be an IP lawyer. For me, the interesting part is that it changes every single day. That’s what I love most about it. There’s a social aspect where I’m with people who have very different areas of expertise to me. That’s a reward in itself because we are coming up with a solution together and I am actually able to dip into different pots of expertise to come up with solutions.

Then there’s the fun of working in the enterprise space. I worked in a law firm when I started, then at the Malta Gaming Authority before joining Betsson. When you’re in-house counsel, your client is your employer. In a law firm, you can always put in a series of disclaimers, but in house you have find ways to do things that keep the business competitive. As a junior you can hide away in a law firm. I have the challenge of training young lawyers fresh out of private practice. They have to learn quickly that their role is to show what the business can do, not the opposite. No one needs to be told the reasons why they shouldn’t go ahead. It is all about being a facilitator, finding ways to make things happen in the real world rather than being too cautious or over-concerned with theoretical risks. And that’s exciting.