ANJL brings Brazil’s betting industry and regulators together to discuss post-regulation security and sustainability

The Association Nacional de Jogos e Loterias (ANJL), together with Editora Globo, held a seminar in Brazil on Friday (14) focused on how to make the betting market safer and more sustainable. For PSPs, the useful part is not the rhetoric: the discussion touched on consumer protection tools, responsible gaming, tax burden, and the ongoing effort to separate licensed operators from the illegal market.

1. The seminar, titled “Desafios pós-regulamentação do mercado de apostas,” brought together sector leaders and specialists to discuss tax burden and sustainability, new consumer protection technologies, and actions in favor of responsible gaming. ANJL president Plínio Lemos Jorge said the event was meant to strengthen the industry and address what he described as daily attacks on the sector.
2. Charmaine Hogan, global head of Government Relations at Playtech, opened the event by describing how more mature and transparent fixed-odds betting markets operate. Her key point was the one operators and providers keep relearning the hard way: each market is unique, requires tailored solutions, and regulation cannot simply be copied and pasted from one jurisdiction to another.
3. Guilherme Mendes Resende, economics professor at the Instituto Brasileiro de Ensino, Desenvolvimento e Pesquisa (IDP), presented an ANJL-commissioned study that challenged a CNC analysis linking betting to household debt. He said the CNC study does not use a control group or counterfactual design, relies on January 2023 as a time marker without clear justification, and does not confirm the betting effect in the two key variables it examines: indebted households and overdue debt.
4. In the first panel on the “Second year post-regulation,” Plínio Lemos Jorge spoke alongside Giovanni Rocco Neto, secretary for Sports Betting and Economic Development of Sport at Brazil’s Ministry of Sport, and Luís Otávio Veríssimo Teixeira, president of the STJD. The discussion covered safeguards already being used by regulated operators, including facial recognition, bans on minors, and investment in research, which were presented as measures that contrast with the illegal market.
5. The event also pointed to match-fixing as a separate pressure point for the sector. That matters for PSPs and acquirers because betting regulation in practice is never just about payments acceptance; it also feeds into customer controls, monitoring obligations, and the broader argument for keeping flows inside the licensed market.