Playtech’s Next Frontier
Why North American expansion is central to the supplier’s next phase of growth
Since its founding nearly 30 years ago, Playtech has cemented itself as a global force in online gaming, but its increased efforts in the U.S. and Canada in recent years have quickly become a central piece of the company’s future growth ambitions.
In 2025, Playtech’s group revenue (€763 million) and adjusted EBITDA (€197 million) fell 10 percent and 9 percent year-over-year, respectively, with its revised partnership agreement with Caliente Interactive in Mexico and the completion of its €2.3 billion sale of Italian B2C business Snaitech flagged as the biggest disruptors. Moving forward into 2026 and beyond, Playtech is returning “to our roots as a leading, global, predominantly pure-play B2B business,” CEO Mor Weizer said in a statement accompanying the company’s full-year results.
A large part of that refocus is the optimism coming from across the Atlantic—despite the top-line declines, Playtech’s B2B revenue in the U.S. and Canada grew 61 percent YoY to €48 million.
“We have achieved strong momentum in the Americas, including expanding into additional iGaming states and growing our Live offering. I’m really pleased to see our efforts in the U.S. paying off and look forward to capturing significant opportunities ahead.”
Mor Weizer, CEO, Playtech
The U.S. segment specifically grew nearly 100 percent YoY, Playtech said, spurred by its partnerships with some of the biggest names in online gaming: DraftKings, FanDuel, Hard Rock Digital and Delaware North. On the Canadian side, Weizer said the supplier has “expanded our iGaming footprint” in the market by launching “with several leading operators, including DraftKings and Caesars, further strengthening our competitive position in the region.”
The upcoming launch of online gaming in Alberta on July 13 also “represents a significant milestone for the province and an important step forward for the broader Canadian iGaming landscape,” Weizer said on the results release. According to World Population Review, Alberta is the fourth-largest Canadian province, with a population of over 5 million; when combined with Ontario, more than 20 million Canadians will have access to regulated iGaming by year’s end, on par with New York, one of the biggest U.S. markets.
Last year’s momentum in those markets has continued into this year. Weizer said on the company’s post-AGM trading update in late May that Q1 performance “in the U.S., in particular, has been encouraging, as returns on our investments over recent years continue to accelerate and contribute meaningfully to profitability.”
“The U.S. is a growth engine. We’re performing quite well, very well indeed, but I see it as just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more to come.”
Jonathan Doubilet, General Manager, U.S., Playtech
“We have achieved strong momentum in the Americas, including expanding into additional iGaming states and growing our Live offering,” Weizer says. “I’m really pleased to see our efforts in the U.S. paying off and look forward to capturing significant opportunities ahead.”
American Inroads
With the roadmap in place, longtime executive Jonathan Doubilet is helping to lead the charge. Doubilet has held several senior roles over the last 15 years, including head of product and director of corporate development, before taking the reins as U.S. general manager in January 2020. The company’s efforts in the region began in earnest about that same time, and the journey, specifically in the U.S., is still in its early stages.
“The U.S. is very important. Did we exceed our expectations? Yeah, I can say we did. But we have to keep up the momentum because we’re very young here,” Doubilet says. “We’ve been here since 2020, and we really only got plugged in to all the different operators here by mid-to-late 2023. So our real story started maybe three years ago… The U.S. is a growth engine. We’re performing quite well, very well indeed, but I see it as just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more to come.”
Playtech is now live in six of the eight U.S. iGaming states, with the most recent launch in Connecticut coming this past March. Despite the ongoing legislative malaise that has kept the sector from expanding to the degree that stakeholders envisioned in previous years, the company is finding ways to capitalize on the growth of existing markets, which seems to be unstoppable.
According to the American Gaming Association, U.S. iGaming posted gross gaming revenue (GGR) of $10.7 billion in 2025, a new record and a 27 percent increase YoY. Online GGR has now grown by at least $1 billion every year since 2020.
In New Jersey and Pennsylvania, iGaming revenue surpassed retail casino revenue in those states for the first time in their histories last year. This rapid growth has created an ultra-competitive environment among the companies vying for limited space.
“Every company is going to have to duke it out and churn out more organic growth within the market they’re in by gaining wallet share, which is something that I think we’re very well positioned to do,” Doubilet says. “The other guys have been doing it for years. We’ve spent so much time plugging into everybody, now is the time to expand our footprint where we are and increase our wallet share.”
This is done, he says, with the help of “better cadence of game releases” as well as “higher quality and more focused and localized content.” But the real growth comes via Playtech’s “multi-pronged approach,” which includes online slots, live dealer games and iPoker. Slots are relatively straightforward but live dealer games, through which online players interact with dealers broadcasting live gameplay from a studio, have a lot of room to grow in the U.S.
“We’re one of two live dealer suppliers within the country, and live dealer lacks maturity within the U.S. market,” Doubilet says. “Whereas overseas, even if you look into Canada, the percentage of GGR generated by live dealer is somewhere up in the 25 percent area of all of GGR generated… Here down in the States, it’s about 10 percent of GGR on average, which shows that there’s clearly room for that vertical to expand.”
Emphasis on Poker
On the iPoker front, Playtech recently partnered with FanDuel to power the latter’s PokerStars relaunch in the U.S. and Canada. The new platform is live in New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania, as well as Ontario.
Doubilet says online poker is “another avenue” to growth in the region, and the company is drawing on its vast experience elsewhere in the world.
“We have a long, proven history of excelling in the iPoker division over in Europe,” he notes. “We’re a very strong player. We have one of the largest market shares and largest shared liquidity pools in all of Europe.”
The hope is that more U.S. states will allow for liquidity pooling or outright legalization, but that prior experience made it so that the company wasn’t starting from scratch.
That said, it still took some time to get the platform approved by local regulators, and “a lot of the work was in the back end in terms of reporting requirements and applying different rule sets,” Doubilet says.
“Poker is originally an American game,” he adds. “It has great traction and then it has a big place in Europe and it’s prominent, which allowed us to innovate greatly, but bringing it back to the shores of its origin, it wasn’t a far stretch.”
Moving forward, the company must strike a balance between aggression and discipline in the U.S., given the fluctuation of legislation. In the first years post-PASPA, market expansions were fast and furious, but progress has ground to a halt in the last two years as the industry has become increasingly divided over the issue of online expansion.
Some stakeholders, mostly from the retail casino side, have become increasingly unhappy with their online counterparts, especially as the gap in revenue growth between the two sides continues to widen. While iGaming revenue shot up nearly 30 percent last year, retail casino revenue grew by just 2.3 percent per AGA data, stoking fears of cannibalization. Additionally, high-profile scandals involving sports betting or prediction markets have diverted lawmakers’ attention and resources away from iGaming discussions.
“You want to be able to innovate but also you’ve got non-negotiables. You need compliance and that’s first and foremost. Then it’s about what you do around making your products more exciting, adapting to new sorts of consumer trends, meeting the demand and continuing to innovate when you have various requirements.”
Richard Bayliss, Director of Product Compliance and Safer Gambling, Playtech
But part of the difficulty of the situation for a company like Playtech is that surprises still emerge. The last-second legalization of iGaming in Maine late last year was a prime example, as that development seemed to materialize out of nowhere. There’s always a possibility that a bill could gain traction quickly, and Doubilet says this possibility must be accounted for.
“There are various degrees of readiness that you have to have,” he explains. “When it comes to new market openings, you don’t want to be last to market. In fact, you want to be first to market. But in the B2B sector, your clients, the operators themselves, they have to want you to be among the first to market so they feel that they have a powerful set of content to go live with and compete with on day one.”
Way Up North
In Canada, the 2022 relaunch of Ontario under a regulated framework from a previously gray market was a major development in its evolution. The province has grown to become one of the top performers in North America, and will soon be joined by Alberta, later this year.
In 2024-25, Ontario generated CA$3.2 billion in iGaming revenue, which was a 32 percent jump YoY according to iGaming Ontario. While the expected returns aren’t quite that high for Alberta, Doubilet says it’s still an opportunity that his team will not be taking lightly.
Doubilet says Playtech’s presence in Canada is “transforming” in a positive way thanks to the new framework.
“We look at it as a good thing because our competition all of a sudden are playing on an even playing field like us,” he says. “So Ontario is a great example. Great launch, great opening in the market. It’s surprising how things are playing out. Before, it was European players for the most part. But you’re seeing American companies or brands like Fanatics, DraftKings and others making inroads into Canada, where they didn’t previously have much of a footprint. So we’ve again tapped up our existing relationships, and Alberta is the next one to come.”
With the next expansion fast approaching, the competition is already building. According to the CBC, dozens of companies have applied for licensure ahead of this summer’s launch, and Ontario’s success is a big factor why.
“We’re going to be there on day one, and we’re going to come out with, for lack of a better term, all guns blazing,” he says. “We’re going to be ready and our games are going to be prominent across the bulk majority of operators there.”
Sustainable and Compliant Growth
The company’s expansion efforts are buttressed by an emphasis on compliance, sustainability and responsible gambling. Helping to maintain and build on that commitment is Richard Bayliss, Playtech’s director of product compliance and safer gambling.
Bayliss moved to the industry side after more than a decade of regulatory experience with the U.K. Gambling Commission. Things are moving much faster now than they were in previous years from a regulatory perspective, he says, but the work has never been more important.
“When I joined Playtech, we had a handful of licenses in different markets because not many countries had regulated at that point,” Bayliss says. “Now we’re up to 38 licenses in 38 different countries all over the globe… I think in the last few years, we’ve seen lots and lots of different approaches (from regulators). Some are hands-off. Others are very interventionist, and those can change quite rapidly.”
Compliance and RG efforts begin before a new market even launches, and the work continues thereafter. Those two processes are “distinct” but also “linked” at the same time, he says, and the most important part of preparation pertains to information gathering. It’s critical to understand “the local peculiarities that you need to adopt in the business” as well as the “motivation of the regulator” as it relates to their expectations and requirements set forth in legislation.
“It’s important to know what the intent of requirements is because that then informs you of the next phase when you’re looking to develop your solution to a particular regulation,” Bayliss says. “In lots of cases, because we’re in so many markets, we can take something that’s already been developed and lift it and either make small changes or no changes and it’s compliant. But where you’ve got these new regulations, new requirements, understanding what the regulator and the politicians were expecting is really important because you have to get it right.”
The dynamism of the industry, especially in markets like the U.S. and Canada with many distinct states and provinces, is both exciting and daunting. While stakeholders hope the pace of legalization ticks up in future years, that doesn’t change the care that goes into each new relationship.
“You want to be able to innovate but also you’ve got non-negotiables,” Bayliss says. “You need compliance and that’s first and foremost. Then it’s about what you do around making your products more exciting, adapting to new sorts of consumer trends, meeting the demand and continuing to innovate when you have various requirements.”
Speaking to GGB on the sidelines of UNLV’s International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking, a triennial event dedicated to cutting-edge gambling research and academia, Bayliss asserts that good regulations can protect consumers and support business—those two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive. When the balance is right, he says, you can “have proper protections in place and an interesting gambling market that is constantly changing.”
“People enjoy gambling,” he says. “They often gamble in small amounts. We’re here in Vegas where it’s on a wholly different scale to what we see in the U.K. People enjoy having a bet on sports. They enjoy playing slot games or poker. And they can do so safely, but it is the responsibility of stakeholders to support that.”
Moving forward, Doubilet says Playtech has “more cards to play” as it continues its growth efforts. Halfway through 2026, the company’s stock is up over 27 percent year-to-date.
Even as legislative sessions around the U.S. have mostly petered out as of writing, there’s still “so much more growth that can be derived for our company” in the near- to medium-term.
“We’re very calculated, but we’re not a one-trick pony, and the last year’s been proof of that,” Doubilet says. “Our iCasino footprint, now that we connected all the wires, which took a little while on its own, now that we’ve done that, we’ll look to expand our wallet share and market share within the country in a pretty significant manner. That’s something that we’re definitely focused on.”
