[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFAoRHrmyiQ?feature=oembed]

Latin America is one of the new hot spots for gambling, and all manner of company are trying to get their foot in the door. That made for a great conference at SBC Digital Summit Latin America, where our Becky Liggero Fontana hosted a panel, featuring Alex Leese, CEO of Pronet Gaming. They spoke after the conference to expand the discussion.

Pronet Gaming already has a fairly significant presence in the LATAM region. “We serve a number of operators over there at the moment, and that is in a combination of the regulated markets, and also the gray markets, although I think it’s probably fair to say that any gray market at the moment in LATAM you can probably define as regulating,” Leese said. “I guess it’s all going to happen, hopefully, within the next 12 months. But I mean it is certainly a region that a lot of people are focused on, you know from all sections of the gaming industry, B2C providers, B2B providers, gaming content providers, it’s the real hot spot at the moment I would say.”

Just like any region isn’t a monolith, neither is South and Central America, and Pronet was kind enough to break down some of the differences. “I guess if we actually go through the markets, I mean in terms of, for example Mexico at the moment, so I mean that has always traditionally been a dot-com market, and I think it’s only recently through the ability to license the online sites via the casino, as in as in the land-based casino licenses, that that’s really kind of opened things up,” he said. “There’s not a huge number of operators at the moment in that market who are fully regulated, and by that I mean in terms of are able to advertise on above-the-line TV, etc, etc. So that’s why I said on the panel that I did, that you know the opportunity there is huge for the right operator with the right profile, with the right local partner of course. And then I guess actually looking into some of the other markets, take Argentina for example, so I think if you’re a dot-com there, I think it’s going to be a little bit tricky now potentially in Buenos Aires province where there’s a limited number of licenses available, I think that will be a struggle. It just depends upon how able the authorities are to block the gray market sites. You look at, you know what happened in Spain which then transferred over to Colombia as a market, they’ve been quite able to block off any dot-com operators.”