Danske Spil interested in new online gambling venture

Denmark’s state-owned online gambling giant Danske Spil is assisting and closely watching the progress of a new internet gambling venture launched by Copenhagen-based Finbetco to marry share price movements with online gambling.

The new venture’s BetOn Finance website is the brainchild of a former Danish market analyst and senior banking official, Jeff Saul, who sees potential for a site that enables punters to gamble on share movements…and a Danske Spil spokesperson has indicated that the gambling group supports his view.

“We are highly committed to following new trends in the gaming market, and we think that this game has potential,” Sofie Ustrup, a spokeswoman for Danske Spil, told Bloomberg business news this week.

“Regular people in Denmark are now starting to pay attention to the stock market, and it has become normal, not just for experts.”

Ustrup revealed that Danske Spil provided help to develop BetOnFinance, including testing, because the combination of finance and gaming “is really, really interesting.”

“Now that they’ve gone live we’re following it very closely, helping with, for example, banner ads. When it’s up and running for some time, we will evaluate the nature of the future collaboration,” she said.

Saul said that his company hired the tech team that developed the popular Hitman third-person shooter game series to create BetOnFinance.

Players bet on the top performer – or the worst losers – each day from a choice of 30 companies which currently include Tesla, Netflix and the biotech firm Gilead. Companies that are too stable for excitement are excluded from the basket of companies available for betting.

Saul claims that there is no regulatory requirement in a financial supervisory sense because the games resemble fantasy sports and there is no correlation between winnings and the actual performance of the underlying stock, differentiating the betting from that on binary options.

“Our product isn’t a financial product: It’s a pool-betting product,” Saul told Bloomberg, revealing that he has obtained a licence to operate in Denmark and plans to obtain another in Malta before moving on to the UK market.

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