This is a guest contribution by Derek Coetzee, Innovation Architect at mLabs. If you would like to submit a contribution please contact Bill Beatty for submission details. Thank you.

Competition commissions and takeover panels exist not as a retirement home for long-serving civil service types to pass away their dotage in the style to which they have become accustomed but rather because M&A activity is inherently anti-competitive.

The phrase of the moment in the betting space is ‘gaining scale’ – or taking competitors out of the market to put it in plainer language. Even if the relevant competition authorities don’t end up intervening in any given corporate action, the consumer will inevitably be faced with less choice once a deal comes to fruition.

So with the current spate of deals in the online betting space we can see a market shaping up that will contain fewer operators, even if some of the separate brand names live on with a kind of nuclear half-life as the larger entities persist with, presumably competition-authority pleasing, dual-brand strategies.