iGaming Daily

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Match fixing is one of the top issues that need to be addressed within the sports betting industry. As the global market grows, the activity becomes more susceptible to fraud and illegal activity. Enter regulatory bodies, sports governance, and organizations like the International Betting Integrity Association, IBIA, which brings together the most important stakeholders in order to prevent any wrongdoing. Welcome to iGaming Daily. I'm Fernando Nott, Media Manager for SBC and your host for today.

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And today I have the pleasure to welcome IBIA's CEO Khalid Ali to the podcast. Khalid, how are you today? Well, I'm very good, Fernando, and thank you for the introduction. I'm pleased to be here. Yes, really great to have you on board. We have discussed issues that your organization uh usually covers and addresses very much in this podcast and multiple times, multiple episodes.

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discussing m sports integrity and all that. So definitely great to have you here. And before we start the conversation about your work, I would like to ask a very quick question to our listeners. Are you heading to G2E? OptiMove is hosting an exclusive Swift Takes industry breakfast, get market insights and hear from some of the top names in the industry. Find out more on this can't miss event in the description of this episode. Thank you very much OptiMove and now let's

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get on with IVIA Khalid, most of our listeners of course already know you very well, already know what the IVIA does, but why don't we break the ice and start the conversation by introducing yourself and what IVIA does for sports integrity. Certainly. mean, I would like to think a lot of people know who we are and the work that we've been doing, but sometimes I get surprised when I go to these, um, you know, conferences and meetings and then people don't really realize there's actually an integrity body.

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which has been created by the betting operators to uh monitor and report suspicious betting. But the International Betting Integrity Association um was created by um the leading sports betting operators 20 years ago. In fact, actually 2025 is our 20th anniversary. And it was created with the main purpose originally was to monitor, detect, report any suspicious betting and then pass that information on

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to the relevant sports governing bodies and regulators. ah We've grown substantially since 20 years. We started off with six betting operators. Now we're almost 90 operators with a combined revenue of about $300 billion. So we are quite a sizable organization now when it comes to um betting integrity. And how long have you been with IVIA yourself?

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Oh, myself personally, well, maybe a bit too long, some people would say, but I've been there since 2008. I uh was asked to join uh because at that time they were still trying to map out what they wanted from the association. uh They needed some arms and legs and my experience and background in trade associations meant that, yeah, I kind of knew the direction that we needed to go in and that was really to build dialogue.

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with the key stakeholders and those key stakeholders for us, sports, regulators, athletes and institutions at that time, it's grown since then. Yeah, well, it's funny that you mentioned stakeholders or it's actually convenient rather than funny because the segment is permanently evolving and the regulations change very often. So how do you address these conversations with the stakeholders as different regulatory frameworks?

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coming to place. I bet it's not the same. uh You don't have the same conversation when addressing someone from the UK than when you talk with someone from Brazil. Absolutely. I mean, and this has been one of the biggest challenges, of course, because the markets are now um growing. It's becoming a much more global industry. I mean, if you went back 20 years ago, I mean, online sports betting was predominantly just European. And even then,

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in Europe, it was a challenge. We have to go back that only a few markets actually were fully opened and licensed. A lot of those European jurisdictions still had monopolies. And what we've seen over the last 20 years, this has been growth in new markets opening. So you've talked about Brazil, but it's not just Brazil, LATAM in general, it started to open up. If you look at North America, significantly, of course, the U.S. opened up in 2018 and now Ontario and Canada has also opened up and

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our job within the International Betting Integrity Association, as well as monitoring and reporting suspicious betting and having those relationships with those stakeholders like law enforcement and sports, we also need to be working with the regulators and decision makers. So the institutions are also extremely important. One of the things that we did actually a few years ago, I think it was back in 2021, we released a study called the optimum betting market study. And it looked at what's a good framework for uh

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sports betting should be or sports betting framework should be. Had a number of points in there. So for example, know, why product offering, uh not being, you know, having a number of uh multi-license, you can not just one operators in that jurisdiction, uh having a GGR taxation wise between 15 to 20%. So these were all kind of elements that come to having a vibrant sports betting market. And if we use, for example,

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Canada, because what we did in that study is we looked at 20 different countries, we ranked them. And this is back in 2021. And the UK came out and top Malta was second, but right at the bottom was Canada. It had a channelization rate of only 31 % because they had prohibited single sports betting. If you fast forward one year to April 4th at 2022, when Ontario opened up its market,

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you will see that that changes drastically. In fact, in 2024, the channelization rate in Ontario was 92 % and is predicted to be by 2028, uh 97%. So that just shows you to demonstrate how important it is to have uh a vibrant, healthy sports betting market. Because one of the things that we need to do as an association and why it's really important that we advocate for this is because we want to see the bets coming onshore.

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So if there's any suspicious betting, gets passed to us through our operators and we then can analyze it and there's anything suspicious, we will then report it to the relevant stakeholder like the sports regulators and in some cases, law enforcement. How do you work to stay on top of those uh trends in the sports betting industry? Because like you mentioned, uh the Canadian market changed a lot from one year to the next. So you need to be like...

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very on top of every market. And of course, it's not only Canada, it's not only Brazil, it's several dozens of different markets with different relations that change all the time. So how do you keep on top of that? we have two parts to Ibea. So there's the operational part. And that is a part that is dealing with uh the monitoring and reporting of the alerts. But then we have another part to Ibea, which is the advisory part. And I'm very fortunate, I have a fantastic team of people

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who are on top of these things. uh They're working with our members because it's also important for them that they have a role in this because they're obviously wanting to be active in those jurisdictions. And so what we need to do is make sure that we have in place the best sports betting framework that's possible. And that has to include integrity provisions.

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that's extremely important when we're looking at these markets. speaking of integrity, speaking of Brazil and speaking of Ontario, they have actually just introduced new regulations that address sports integrity specifically. So how do you assess these new regulations, which kind of set a new tone to how you regulate around sports integrity? And how do you think they may help shape the global landscape? Well, what Brazil and Ontario have done is extremely important because they've made it a requirement.

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that if you are an operator uh in that jurisdiction, you need to be part of an international monitoring system. Now, it's not just Brazil and Ontario. The US and many of the US states also have this requirement. If you look closer to home, for me anyway, in Europe, you could look at the Netherlands is also one of those other jurisdictions where there is this requirement. And this requirement is absolutely fundamental, I believe, in protecting the sports.

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betting market. I think it's a role of all the stakeholders, especially from the betting industry, that if they see anything that they think is irregular, um that they pass it on to a monitoring body like ours so that we can then analyze it and see if there's enough evidence there to pass it on as a suspicious alert. And just to give you a little bit of context, mean, we have reported in the last five years over 1200 um alerts to the relevant sports

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governing bodies. And if I break that down, I 397 alerts were sent to tenants, the International Tennis Integrity Agency, 221 alerts to the International Olympic Committee. And then for football, we break it down into FIFA and UEFA. FIFA was 186 alerts and for UEFA it was 148 alerts. And also an upcoming trend, eSports, over the last five years we reported 121 alerts.

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to the eSports Integrity Commission. Khalid, a lot of things to process right now. So we're going to do a very quick commercial break so that our listeners can get everything together. And we'll be right back with more iGaming Daily with Khalid Ali, CEO of iBIA.

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And we are back with more iGaming Daily today welcoming CEO of IVIA, Khalid Ali. Khalid, you recently struck deals with payment providers in Brazil to help you work in the country, which is of course booming with the new regulation and all that. So how important are these types of deals with local organizations to get a better sense of what's going on in the country? Yeah, maybe I would take a step back. mean, one of the things that we have been doing as an association as well as a

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the operational advisory we've started to build standards and those standards around payments, specifically in Brazil because it's a new market that's opened up. And in some cases, we've seen this as a pilot project almost before we go out with it further globally. That would be the plan at some point. But we've also got standards and data. So coming to the payment providers forum in Brazil, I mean, we...

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I mean, payments are the first line of defense against any illicit activity. uh And so where the money flows, that's where we can see where the risk could be. And by partnering with the local banks and fintechs in Brazil, adds another layer to the oversight to block fraud, money laundering, and any illegal betting transactions. yeah, for us, the payment provider format in Brazil is, uh as I've mentioned, it's a pilot project. It's going really well. We already have

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six payment providers in Brazil who have signed up. There's more on the horizon. We've already had four meetings this year, two of them being physical, and we're aiming for a fifth meeting. And we're directly engaging with the Ministry of Finance. while work is now underway to see what other initiatives we can be doing with some publications, we hope, coming out in the next 12 months.

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All right, you mentioned how important it is to actually be on top of the payment processing side of betting because it's like the first line of defense against any fraudulent activity. So how important is it to work with other segments and which would they be? Like, for example, let's say data providers. Yeah, absolutely. And Luke, so we take a very holistic view when it comes to betting integrity.

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Obviously we have the sports betting operators and they are our members and they're the kind of the primary focus of what we've been doing for the last 20 years. But since then, as I mentioned, we started to build this out. So the payment providers forum is what we introduced the beginning of this year. But since 2021, we've also been doing work with the big data providers like sports radar and stats perform who form our data standards group.

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And that's also a very key component when it comes to protecting the betting ecosystem. uh Because ultimately the operators are buying data from these companies and they need to make sure that, you know, there's a number of standards there that, you know, in terms of latency, in terms of how it's being checked, all that kind of stuff, which is also the work that we have been facilitating as an association. And ah at the beginning of the episode, we were

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just discussing how I believe that most people know about the organization. You said that you like to think that most people do, but you recently actually decided to go on a rebranding process. So why don't you tell us about that and what the reasons are behind that? Yeah. And so, mean, we have always taken a five year view to everything that we have done.

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When we started this project, so going back to 2005, I I came in, as I mentioned earlier, I came in 2008. We were called the European Sports Security Association. It was a name made up by the six operators who originally started it. was their CEOs who started it. It was a name they came up with. It didn't really reflect who we were and what we did. And in 2018, we did a consultation with our members and stakeholders and also looking at where the market was going with the US opening up with

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what we were beginning to see in Brazil, we decided to rebrand to the International Betting Integrity Association. And then as it came to our uh 20th year, 2025, last year we undertook another consultation, just to speak to our members again, to speak to some of our key stakeholders, which included sports, regulators, other trade associations that we work with, to define where we need to be as an association over the next five years.

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And as a result of that consultation, we now have a roadmap, which we call Mission 2030. And that will now define what our vision and ambition and priorities are for the next five years. And that's something we're going to be working on from now. Part of that Mission 2030 is to refresh how IBEA looks. And I think that's an important part for us now.

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Um, so this is the whole point of, um, the rebranding. So we needed to have a loop which will match our ambitions to be where we want to be in 2030. And that is to be the global standard when it comes to betting integrity. So lofty ambition, but we're all kind of committed to it. This is what we're aiming for. And to get there, the rebrand is part of that process. And speaking of processes, uh, since we're already wrapping this episode up.

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Why don't we just break down what the main challenges for the industry are right now in terms of sports integrity and what issues do you think the industry needs to address to prevent further problems from building up in the future? mean, look, again, we need to take a step back because obviously sports betting integrity, it's an issue. There's always when something major happens, it's headline news. But just to give you

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staff between 2017 and 2023 when it came to football matches, IBEA members offered 950,000 football matches in that period. And of that 950,000 football matches, we reported 404 football matches for suspicious activity, meaning that 99.96 % of matches showed no integrity concerns. So I think that's important because

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We shouldn't make it into something bigger than it's not. But it's an issue, it's important, we need to deal with it. And that's why an association like ours has been created. Now, when it comes back to what are the challenges, I guess, there's really three areas that we are looking at. The first one is looking at organized networks, which are exploiting poorly or unregulated betting markets. Regulation and monitoring, which is what we've already touched upon.

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That's extremely important, having a vibrant, healthy uh sports betting market so that m we can get the operators onshore uh and following the rules and regulations. And then also sports governance. Sports governance also has a big role to play because the weaker your governance rules are, the more likely it is that you're going to be exploited or players will be exploited. And that comes to my other point, which is going to be a right player education. One of the things I'm personally proud of.

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is that when I started with IBEA was that we were the first to introduce with the EU athletes, the do's and don'ts on sports betting for athletes. It was an education campaign that we rolled out for 10 years. It got funded by the European commission. It reached 36,000 athletes across 10 sports in Europe. And then in 2023, we started another

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education program. This time we hired an education ambassador, John Francois, who was the secretary general of the EU athletes. At that time, we brought him on board to be our education ambassador. And we're now doing a project in Canada, whereby we've got commitment from three of our members, Banjul, Betway and Bet365, who've committed $300,000 for an education campaign there. And we've started that.

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The first sport that we looked at was the Canadian Football League, Soccer League. And we've started educating, I think we educated over 200 players for that. And I think there's new things in the pipeline. And we're also looking at other jurisdictions now. Khalid, we'll definitely keep an eye out on what IVIA is doing. Or actually, I've been saying IVIA, but you've been saying IBEA. how should we say it?

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Well, you know, it's like my name. People call me Khaled. Some people call me Khaled. At the end of the day, it means the same. I understand that. yeah, it's all good. Okay. Okay. Then we'll, keep the focus on what you guys have been doing and what you will continue to do, which is very important. And before we close this episode, I would like to give a big shout out to Sylvia Pagliari who is from the organization and she, know she is a fan of the podcast. So big shout out for her Khaled.

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Thank you very much for joining us today. Pleasure. And to our listeners out there, we'll meet you in the next one. Goodbye.