IBIA calls for LatAm jurisdictions to adopt robust sports betting integrity provisions
IBIA welcomes the Brazilian requirement for operators to join an independent integrity monitoring body.
Press release.- The International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA) today urged Latin American decision-makers to intensify efforts in establishing a robust sports betting integrity framework to combat match-fixing.
According to the association, the new Brazilian regulatory framework, which mandates licensed sports betting operators to join an independent integrity monitoring body, serves as a model that should be adopted across the LatAm region.
The adverse impact of match-fixing on the Brazilian betting market and sport continues to be an issue of significant importance. IBIA therefore stated it welcomes the recent publication of Ordinance 827/2024 and its integrity reporting requirements as a vital step towards addressing any integrity concerns. Brazil is poised to become an integrity leader in LatAm, where IBIA has reported 127 cases of suspicious betting to regional authorities over the past five years.
Khalid Ali, CEO of IBIA, said: “The Ordinance’s stipulation that operators in Brazil must join an independent sports integrity monitoring body is helping to drive growth in IBIA’s membership and in our ability to monitor more betting transactions in Brazil’s regulated market. Our priorities are to further strengthen our monitoring and alert network and extend our information sharing agreements with partner organisations in Brazil and across the Latin American region.”
The new regulatory regime has made Brazil an attractive market for licensed sports betting operators: it is projected to achieve $34bn in sports betting turnover by 2028, according to a recent study by H2 Gambling Capital.
IBIA already accounts for more than 60 per cent of Brazil’s remote gambling market, a share that continues to grow and has recently agreed to an integrity information sharing and wider anti-match-fixing partnership with Genius Sports. IBIA is therefore well placed to support a crack-down on match-fixing in Brazil and wider LatAm as new gambling legislation gathers pace across the region.
Ali stated: “With legalisation comes renewed responsibility to protect the sports betting market, sports and consumers from match-fixing. Brazil has set a high bar on integrity, but there remains a lot of work to do in the wider LatAm region. Our focus must be on creating a robust sports betting integrity ecosystem across the whole LatAm marketplace. IBIA will therefore be working with its widening LatAm network to ramp-up monitoring and strengthen the collaboration between key stakeholders.”
See also: IBIA reports rise in suspicious betting alerts in Q1
IBIA, a not-for-profit organisation, operates without competing interests in commercial sectors and is managed by operators to safeguard regulated sports betting markets from match-fixing. IBIA provides a free integrity monitoring and alert service to sports governing bodies, gambling regulators and law enforcement agencies, enabling all parties to cooperate in investigating, prosecuting and deterring sports betting-related match-fixing.
IBIA’s monitoring and alert network is the largest and most effective of its kind. It harnesses the collective resources of the world’s biggest sports betting operators and can monitor and analyse $300bn in global betting transactions per annum. By monitoring transactional activity at the consumer account level it provides much more detailed and accurate information on suspicious bets to support investigations than systems which simply monitor betting odds movements.