Ecuador sets new licensing and AML rules for sports betting, with a $315,000 annual fee and Palantir-based monitoring from January 2027

Ecuador is moving to a tighter supervisory model for sports betting: a formal license, higher upfront economics, and technology aimed at spotting laundering patterns. For PSPs and operators, the important part is not the headline fee; it is that access to the market now comes with banking, reporting, and identity-verification obligations attached.

1. The only authorization for the business is the Licencia para Operadores de Pronósticos Deportivos (LOPD). The Ministry of Education, Sport and Culture (MINEDEC) set the application process in September 2026.
2. According to lawyer Carlos José Riofrío, calculating with 2026 parameters, each company that wants to offer sports betting in Ecuador would pay about $315,000 per year. The legal entity must be domiciled in Ecuador, have net worth of at least $500,000, and post an immediate-collection bank guarantee worth 1% of that net worth — around $5,000 at the minimum threshold.
3. The authority has up to 90 days to review each file across legal, financial, technical, and operational checks. If approved, the license lasts five years and requires an annual payment equal to 655 unified basic salaries.
4. The license is only one layer. Companies must also register with the Unidad de Análisis Financiero y Económico (UAFE), certify their platform technically, maintain a dedicated bank account for the operation, and apply policies for responsible gambling, anti-money laundering, data protection, and user identity verification.
5. Oversight will lean heavily on technology. José Julio Neira, secretary general of Public Administration, Planning and Cabinet, said on Teleamazonas’ De Lunes a Lunes that from January 2027 the UAFE will use a Palantir platform. He described it as the first financial intelligence unit in the world to use that system and the first country in Latin America to have it, with AI used to identify patterns linked to illicit activity.

Neira also said the government prefers to control the market rather than ban it, contrasting Ecuador’s approach with recent decisions in Brazil under Lula da Silva. He added that the Fiscalía is already working on the prevention and reporting of unusual transactions totaling billions of dollars.

The thing is: for high-risk operators, Ecuador is not just introducing a license. It is building a market where the regulator wants both economic friction and data visibility, which is usually the part that matters most when banks and PSPs decide whether to stay in, scale back, or walk away.