SiGMA Americas Virtual Summit Argentina welcomed market experts to discuss Argentine’s fragmented federated state regulation as well as evolving regulation across the developing Argentinian markets.

Moderator Reuben Portanier, Director of Afilexion Alliance, was joined by Victor Arias, Vice President for LatAm for Pragmatic Play, Victor Araneda, International Business Development Director of GAMING1, and Sebastian Vivot the Technology Manager at Lotería. Argentina and the complexity of its fragmented federal states regulation

Providing context to the discussion. Argentina is the second largest stretch of land in Latin American, with a population of forty-five million people. It also has the third largest GDP in the South American region, Buenos Aires holding the highest GDP per capita among the major cities in Latin America. Impressively, the estimation on the gaming tax revenue on from sports betting alone is estimated to be or will be around $6.8 million. 

Fragmented federated States regulation and Argentina  

What’s unique to Argentina is that there are 23 provinces in Argentina and one autonomous city, which is the city of Buenos Aires. When discussing the autonomous city, we mean autonomous in terms of regulation or exploitation of the gambling industry both for land-based on online gaming.  

This has created a lot of problems for the country, specifically, the city of Buenos Aires, as Vivot notes: 

It is not the licence that’s the main issue, the primary challenge occurs as a result of our constitutional and regulatory differences”.  

The reason for this being the contrasting regulation between the different provinces; unlike other neighboring cities, Buenos Aires needs specific permits on top of holding licenses for international or national operators.  

Smaller provinces and Buenos Aires have been negatively affected this style of regulation; as well as smaller provinces failing to attract international operators due to their size.

Compliance and Argentine’s attractiveness  

From a compliance point of view, Arias argues its complicated for them:  

“for content providers and it’s gonna be the same for operators, you know, to get into the market due to the fact that, you know, each province has its own terms…its own commercial criteria”.   

What has also proven to be an obstacle is the depreciation of the Argentinian currency (Peso) for both operators and suppliers.  

Arias reaffirms:

the devaluation of the currency, it’s something that, you know, it’s affecting everybody.  

COVID-19 and its influence on regulation 

When discussing whether COVID-19 has ignited an acceleration in the take up of regulatory frameworks by the other 19 provinces, Arenada comments:

For the case of our market, Argentinian market, I think that the reality of having the capital and the province going through a regulatory process of their own is probably a bigger incentive than Covid19 itself.  

SiGMA Agenda: 

SiGMA Group Americas Digital Summit is running from the 22nd to 24th September, bringing well-known faces from the Latin American gaming and tech sector to a series of in-depth debate panels, with content offered in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.  

The 7th edition of SiGMA Europe will move its November event to February 16th to 18th 2021.