WLA initiatives to support members
Kötter presented an overview of industry trends, highlighting statistics from the WLA Global Lottery Data Compendium on global sales by region for 2025, during which Asia led with a few percent ahead of Europe.
He explained key activities undertaken to support members over the past year, including:
- The development of a Position Paper on Prediction Markets, in response to the rapid and largely unregulated expansion of such markets.
- WLA joint project with University of Lausanne, School of Criminology, which resulted in the development of a credible framework for sizing illegal gambling markets.
- The targeted resource, Project RED, which provides tools and strategies to help member lotteries tackle responsible gaming, environmental and broader CSR challenges.
- WLA joint partnership with the East Carolina University, Gambling Research & Policy Initiative, and the microsite Reaching Emerging Adults, created as a resource hub to help members understand and respond to gambling risk among young adults.
WLA stance on Prediction Markets
WLA Executive Director Luca Esposito presentedthe WLA’s Position Paper on Prediction Markets, noting:
“Prediction markets offering sport-event or lottery-based contracts without a proper local licence are operating illegally.Rebranding bets as 'contracts' and players as 'traders' does not change thelegal nature of the activity.”
The Paper calls for urgent alignment between gaming and financial market regulators to close regulatory gaps and ensure prediction markets are subject to the same licensing, integrity, return to society and consumer protection standards as betting, and urges stakeholders to act without delay:
- WLA Members should engage proactively with regulators to ensure they are properly informed.
- Regulators and governments should require all entities offering financial contracts on event outcomes to obtain the appropriate gaming/betting licence before operating.
- Sports bodies and integrity monitoring organizations should include prediction markets in sports integrity monitoring frameworks and suspicious transaction reporting (STR) obligations.
