Inside Tonybet’s Expansion Strategy: One Platform, Multiple Regulated Markets

The iGaming industry is expanding rapidly, but growth is becoming harder to capture. Operators must now navigate tighter regulation, rising compliance costs, changing payment habits and increasingly demanding players—all while entering new markets faster than their rivals.

For Tonybet, the opportunity lies in treating that complexity as a competitive advantage. In this interview, Jurijs explains how the company is using regulation, localisation, proprietary technology and a standardised operational backbone to support efficient expansion across Europe and North America.

European Business Magazine: Jurijs, it is a pleasure to have you with us. The iGaming industry continues to grow, but it is also becoming more competitive and operationally complex. Where do you currently see the biggest opportunities for operators such as Tonybet?

The biggest opening is for operators who treat regulation as an advantage rather than a cost to be minimised. A run of markets is opening more or less together – Alberta goes live on 13 July, Ireland licenses remote operators from 1 July, and Finland’s competitive market follows in 2027 – and what each one really tests is whether you can run a compliant, well-localised operation from the first day. A lot of operators are still putting that together when the doors open. We treat it as standard kit, so we can be ready early, and across a few launches that head start compounds into real market share.

What does “efficient growth” mean for Tonybet today compared to a few years ago? What changed and why?

A few years ago it meant adding headcount and budget in step with every new market. Now it means leverage. The whole compliance and payments backbone we used to rebuild for each jurisdiction is standardised, so a new market is largely a configuration job rather than a fresh build. The cost of the next launch keeps falling even as the bar we set ourselves rises. Last year’s figures – revenue up 126%, registrations up 94% – are what that discipline looks like once it’s bedded in.

EXPANSION INTO MARKETS 

You’ve expanded across multiple regulated markets in a relatively short space of time. How do you evaluate which new markets align best with Tonybet’s long-term strategy?

A lot of it is whether a market rewards doing the work properly. We want rules that are clear and, more to the point, actually enforced, because that’s what protects players and the operators who follow the rules alongside them. We want the ground to be ready, too – Finland is the obvious example, with open banking already the way people pay, so a regulated product has somewhere to land. And we want to know how much of what we’ve built will carry across, because if we can adapt rather than start from scratch, the economics work and we stay for the long haul.

What has been the biggest operational challenge when scaling across jurisdictions? What have been the key lessons learned from that journey?

It’s the job of holding one standard across markets that all pull in slightly different directions. The easy mistake is to build a separate operation in each one. You can always tell who’s done it, because they turn into seven companies wearing the same logo, with no real grip on any of them. We wanted the opposite: a single core that holds everywhere, with everything we localise sitting at the level of the player’s experience – the payment methods they expect, support in their own language, the way the product feels to use in their market. That way we catch problems early, and we can move across the whole business at once whenever a regulator changes the rules.

Can you share an example of how insights from one market have helped drive success in another?

Ontario, easily. It was our breakthrough into North America’s competitive regulated model, and Alberta has more or less modelled itself on it, right down to the same split between a licensing regulator and a separate body running the commercial side. So because we’d already cleared Ontario’s bar, most of what Alberta asks for was tested and working long before we filed. That’s why we’re adapting something we already trust rather than building from nothing, and why we can be ready for the market’s launch. Every regulated market we get through makes the next one quicker, because the learning doesn’t reset but stacks up.

OPERATIONS / STRATEGY 

Putting expansion to one side, what’s keeping you busy internally right now? What’s the work you’re doing today that you think will really move the needle in the next 12 to 18 months? 

Mostly the systems nobody sees. Payments is where most of our attention goes – turnover through our processing grew 103% last year, and keeping that steady as volumes climb is relentless work, market by market and method by method. Fraud prevention and the responsible-gaming side sit right alongside it, both leaning harder on models every year. All of it is being tested in real time at the moment. Our World Cup Card Collection is running the length of the tournament, and a campaign on that scale loads every one of those systems at once. The responsible-gaming controls keep it to the registered players it’s meant for. None of that work is visible in the campaign itself, but it’s what lets the campaign run cleanly. The job that carries us through the next year is making the whole of that backbone quicker and smarter – which is really a question about technology.

Players are changing constantly, and every operator is trying to keep up. What shifts in behaviour have caught your attention the most, and how is Tonybet responding to that?   

Payment behaviour, first of all. The card is increasingly just how people make their opening deposit; after that they go to wallets or pay-by-bank, especially across the Baltics, the Netherlands and Finland. We’ve put real weight behind that, because a quick deposit and a fast payout do more for loyalty than any bonus ever has. The other big one is how much control people expect while a bet is live – cashing out part of a position, managing it as the game changes. Serious bettors now treat that as the baseline, so we’ve built it in.

PRODUCT / TECH

From the outside, a lot of operators can look quite similar in terms of what they offer. How do you make sure Tonybet stands out in a way that actually matters to players?

It comes down to leaving the player a little more alone than the rest of the industry does. Most of the competition runs on pressure – louder bonuses, more prompts to bet again – and we’ve deliberately done less of that, building a product that’s meant to feel unhurried, with terms you can actually follow and money that comes back when it should. So if someone’s just placed a first bet, we’re more likely to point them at a tool for handling changing odds than to push them into the next one. Over time, people can feel who respects their time and their money, which, in the end, is far harder to copy than a sign-up offer.

What role does technology play in supporting the company’s growth and operational efficiency?

Technology is the reason we can hold one high standard everywhere at once. Most of the repetitive, error-prone work is automated, which frees the team to put its hours into the product and into player protection rather than processing. The bigger call, though, was building our own platform instead of licensing a white-label one – because although that cost more upfront and took longer, it lets us bend the product to whatever a regulator asks without waiting on someone else’s release schedule. And that freedom is what efficiency actually buys you.

Data and personalisation are big buzzwords right now. How much of a role do they actually play in how Tonybet operates?

A genuine role, though we keep it on a tight rein. The lobby learns from how someone actually plays and adjusts to it, and we sort players by type from the very start – a casual slots player and a committed sports bettor want different things, safeguards included. The use we value most, though, is responsible gaming, where the same signals that personalise a session can catch trouble before it becomes harm. That’s why we run it strictly: we keep the data to a minimum, and any decision that would restrict an account is left to a person rather than the model.