Gambling Insider was invited to an exclusive preview of SOFTSWISS’ 2027 iGaming Trends Report during SBC Summit week in Lisbon.
The conversation was supposed to be about AI, regulation and the next billion-dollar markets. Then Brazil happened.
There are worse places to discuss the future of iGaming than a Portuguese vineyard. On the eve of the latest SBC Summit, Gambling Insider joined a small group of invited media just outside Lisbon, for an exclusive first look at SOFTSWISS’ fifth annual iGaming Trends Report.
The setting was deliberately removed from the usual conference-floor chaos. The invite-only launch brought together speakers from SOFTSWISS, AWS, Pentasia and Google, with CNN’s Elliott Gotkine moderating discussions spanning AI, personalization, compliance and the hunt for the industry’s next major growth markets.
But there was an elephant in the vineyard. Brazil had just abruptly gone from one of the global industry’s most closely watched growth stories to a case study in how quickly the economics of a regulated iGaming market can be turned upside down. And, as the afternoon went on, Brazil kept finding its way back into the conversation.
The Industry Grew Up. Did Regulation Keep Pace?
There is a slightly awkward contrast at the heart of SOFTSWISS’ 2027 report. The industry, it argues, is growing up.
SOFTSWISS’ research puts global online gambling GGR at $349 billion in 2026 and forecasts the market to continue expanding, while its five-year review argues that iGaming is becoming increasingly intertwined with the wider digital economy. Regulation, payments, AI, customer acquisition, cybersecurity and data infrastructure are no longer separate conversations. Increasingly, they are parts of the same operating model.
Big market doesn’t mean profitable market, but ready market. – Olga Resiga, SOFTSWISS
That was also one of the big messages from the room. Alexandra Kavelich, Deputy CMO at SOFTSWISS, argued that iGaming has moved well beyond being a niche gambling vertical and is becoming part of a much broader digital economy. During the presentation, she said the industry’s rapid growth was beginning to slow, which SOFTSWISS sees not necessarily as bad news, but as a sign of increasing maturity.
Robin Harrison, Global Content Director B2B at WorldGaming, meanwhile, pointed to a quieter transformation happening underneath the industry’s headline-grabbing AI discussion: compliance systems, payment technology and monitoring tools are increasingly becoming interconnected. That sounds like a maturing digital industry. Then you have Brazil.
“It’s very difficult in the wake of what happened in Brazil on Friday to say that the regulatory side is not potentially putting on more pressure,” Harrison said during the discussion. His argument was that while the industry itself may be maturing technologically, regulatory responses do not necessarily mature at the same pace.
“The regulation doesn’t feel as mature as the industry,” he said. “And of course, look, regulation always moves slower than the thing that it’s ultimately trying to claim hold to and to control.”
SOFTSWISS Says Brazil Shows How Quickly the Picture Can Change
For anyone who had spent the previous year talking about Brazil as the great regulated-market opportunity, the timing was difficult to ignore. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government issued a Sept. 25 provisional measure banning online betting, prompting Flutter Entertainment to cease both sports betting and iGaming operations in the country. The measure must be approved or amended by Congress within 120 days to remain in effect. Flutter has said it is reviewing its options, including a potential appeal.
Brazil is obviously a great example of what happens when that trust isn’t there because, as of 6th October, we don’t have a market anymore. – Robin Harrison, WorldGaming
As Gambling Insider previously reported, Flutter estimates that remaining out of Brazil through the end of 2026 would reduce revenue by approximately $70 million and adjusted EBITDA by around $20 million. Those numbers only tell part of the story. Flutter acquired a 56% stake in NSX in 2025, combining Betnacional with Betfair Brazil, in a transaction carrying total consideration of $674 million. Brazil then generated $146 million for Flutter during the first half of 2026. As recently as August, outgoing CEO Peter Jackson was describing it as “an attractive long-term opportunity.”
That makes the SOFTSWISS report particularly interesting in hindsight, even though that hindsight is only a matter of days. Its Latin America section describes Brazil as already ranking among the world’s largest online betting markets. It also highlights Betano, Superbet and Bet365 as the country’s three biggest brands by market share and says that, despite its promise, Latin America’s “propensity for disruption remains equally strong.”
But the sentence now reads rather differently. The report also quotes Udo Seckelmann of Bichara e Motta Advogados predicting that 2027 would bring “greater market consolidation” in Brazil, alongside “a greater focus on responsible gambling and compliance,” while warning that regulatory stability would be critical to attracting long-term investment. Again, timing is everything.
The Next Big Market May Not Be the Biggest
Eventually, Gotkine dispensed with the subtlety. “I know there is a bit of a Brazilian elephant in the room,” he told the panel as the conversation turned to the next billion-dollar digital growth markets.
What followed was considerably less polished than the usual conference discussion about total addressable markets. Asked what Brazil’s move meant for the industry, Harrison’s answer was short: “A lot of pain and a lot of wasted investment, human capital, man hours.” And litigation? “Oh yeah, a lot of law firms.”
The more revealing moment came immediately afterward, when Harrison was asked where the next major growth markets might emerge. “Last year we said Brazil,” he replied. It got a laugh, but it also neatly summarized one of the industry’s biggest problems.
A market can have population, smartphones, payment infrastructure, enthusiastic consumers and enormous theoretical potential. None of those things guarantees that the regulatory foundations underneath the investment will remain where operators thought they were.
Harrison suggested that the more useful signals are mobile-first consumer behavior, regulatory clarity, a viable product mix and embedded local payment methods, rather than simply chasing the largest addressable market.
SOFTSWISS CBDO Olga Resiga went further. “I would prefer not to point out the specific markets,” she said. “And this elephant you were mentioning before is a good proof of that.”
For Resiga, the lesson is that size alone is a poor proxy for opportunity. “Big market doesn’t mean profitable market, but ready market,” she said, arguing operators need to assess regulatory predictability alongside consumer behavior, technology and commercial fundamentals. That may be one of the more useful takeaways from the entire report.
Compliance Is Becoming Part of the Product Itself
If Brazil exposed the problem, much of the rest of the afternoon was about the industry’s attempt to build an answer. And, surprisingly enough, that answer was compliance.
Not exactly the word guaranteed to keep journalists awake after a Portuguese wine tasting, but SOFTSWISS’ report argues that compliance is shifting away from periodic reporting toward continuous, data-driven oversight. The report describes regulators increasingly moving beyond individual operator accounts toward monitoring players, transactions and entities across interconnected systems.
Harrison made a similar point during the discussion. Real-time monitoring may be expensive to build and maintain, he said, but it also produces a much stronger body of evidence about how regulated operators actually behave. That matters when the alternative is policy being made amid political pressure, public concern and rapidly changing perceptions of gambling.
“If that data is there and there’s nowhere for the operators to hide if something goes wrong, that potentially provides that baseline,” Harrison said. “So, the technology ultimately could provide the mitigation in the longer term.”
Resiga, meanwhile, argued that operators and suppliers need to stop thinking about compliance as something bolted onto a finished product. It has to be built into the architecture from the beginning.
Previously, she said, companies might “build a product, then you put on top the compliance layer.” Now, the objective is to make compliance part of the underlying technology, allowing products to adapt more quickly when entering regulated markets and reducing the risk of expensive mistakes.
Brazil demonstrates the limitation, of course. Compliance architecture can help a company respond to regulation, but it cannot guarantee that regulation itself will remain predictable.
AI Can Accelerate Decisions, Not Eliminate Uncertainty
It also put some useful limits around another word that appeared almost everywhere during the launch: AI.
The report says 85% of betting and gaming companies globally have adopted AI, although the industry’s AI maturity score remains just 45 out of 100. In other words, there is a considerable gap between experimenting with AI and successfully industrializing it.
We are still in early days of AI… at this moment, we’re not there yet. – Denis Romanovskiy, SOFTSWISS Chief AI Officer
For market expansion, however, the attraction is obvious. Kristina Medvedeva, Head of Marketing at Google, said generative AI is making it considerably cheaper and faster to experiment with localization, creative production and market entry before committing substantial resources. Her broader point was that operators can test more, move faster and diversify risk.
But Brazil kept intruding even here. Asked whether AI could reduce the risk of a government suddenly changing the economics of a market, Resiga laughed off the premise.
“You know, now I don’t know what minimizes risks, to be honest.”
AI, she said, can shorten the journey from collecting information to making a decision. Adaptable technology can then shorten the next journey, from that decision to actually entering the market. The final decision, however, remains human.
And perhaps that is the more interesting iGaming story than whether AI can write marketing copy, automate customer service or shave another few percentage points from operating costs. Technology is making gambling businesses faster. Regulation is becoming more data-driven. Compliance is becoming continuous. Operators can localize products more efficiently, process more information and enter markets with increasingly adaptable platforms.
Yet none of that eliminates political and regulatory risk, and Brazil has become an unusually dramatic demonstration of the point. For Flutter, the immediate consequence is measurable. Operations stopped, tens of millions of dollars in 2026 revenue are at risk and a market in which it invested hundreds of millions of dollars is suddenly unavailable.
For the wider iGaming industry, the question is bigger. At a launch devoted to predicting what comes next in 2027, Brazil provided an uncomfortable reminder that sometimes the most consequential trend is the one the industry did not see coming.
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