Maarten Haijer: Achievements and Impact – EGBA’s Year in Review

Maarten Haijer, Secretary General, EGBA:

2024, a significant year for EGBA’s membership expansion

We welcomed Superbet Group and LeoVegas Group as new operator members, further extending our geographical coverage across Europe. We also broadened our representation with the addition of identity verification specialist Sumsub, joining as associate member. This growing and diverse membership strengthens our collective voice as we seek to enhance our capacity to drive positive change across the sector.

The fourth European Safer Gambling Week marked a milestone in our efforts to promote safer gambling, expanding to a record 26 countries with 195 stakeholders participating, including eight national gambling authorities. The campaign reached 3 million citizens with translated safety messages and featured 20 events that attracted 4,500 registrations. Those numbers are impressive, but the quality of discussion was also exceptional, with sessions exploring everything from AI trends, problem gambling survey data, to innovations in safer gambling tools.

Building on our responsibility initiatives, our 2024 Annual Sustainability Report revealed encouraging progress, with 65% of our members’ European customers – a record 21 million – using safer gambling tools, and over 67 million messages sent by our members to their players in support of safer play.

On the regulatory front, EGBA continued its efforts to promote balanced frameworks that protect consumers while enabling open and fair market competition. With Finland’s upcoming reforms, all EU member states will soon have adopted some form of multi-licensing – a significant milestone that validates our long-standing position that competitive, multi-licensed markets – not monopolies – are the best way to protect consumers and achieve policy goals.

Looking ahead, we will build on these achievements. We aim to make this year’s European Safer Gambling Week even more impactful and refine our annual sustainability reporting even further. We will continue to promote sensible reforms in countries where there are still product prohibitions, partial monopolies, or anti-competitive licensing frameworks for online gambling.

With the new European Commission beginning its mandate, we look forward to engaging constructively with it and the other EU institutions on the latest policy issues affecting our sector. Through our work in various regulatory forums, at both EU and national level, we will continue to ensure that the gambling industry’s voice is heard in key policy discussions.

I would like to thank our members, industry partners, and stakeholders across the sector whose support and expertise make our work possible and inspires us to do more. Together, we are raising standards and guiding our sector towards a more sustainable path. In the next 12 months, there is more to do, and we hope you will join us on the journey.