![\"Wiztech](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/media.europeangaming.eu\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Yoni-Sidi-Wiztech-Group-The-window-is-narrow-on-Europes-prediction-markets-1.jpg?resize=800%2C420&ssl=1\")
\nKey findings<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n\n- On the real opportunity<\/strong>: ‘The opportunity isn’t to replicate Polymarket. It never was.’<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- On genuine differentiation<\/strong>: ‘If all you do is rebrand “Tottenham to win” as an “event contract,” you haven’t built a prediction market product. You’ve built a skin.’<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- On the platform build<\/strong>: ‘An operator bolting this on themselves is looking at 12\u201318 months of development, a trading team re-skilling program, and a settlement framework built under production pressure.’<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- On Gibraltar’s PredictStreet licence<\/strong>: ‘Gibraltar’s move matters more as a signal than as a passport. It doesn’t give you access to France, Germany, the Netherlands or Sweden.’<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- On the timeline<\/strong>: ‘The window is narrow \u2014 probably three to five years before the large operators fully commit.’<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Building inside the licence, not around it<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nEuropean Gaming (EG)<\/strong>: The peer-to-peer exchange model that made Polymarket famous is exactly what France, the Netherlands and others have <\/strong>moved to block<\/strong><\/a>. When you talk about a commercial opportunity in Europe, what specifically can a licensed operator build today that a regulator won\u2019t shut down?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYoni Sidi:<\/strong> The opportunity isn’t to replicate Polymarket. It never was. Polymarket’s model, open P2P exchange, crypto settlement, politically sensitive markets, no KYC, was always going to collide with European financial and, in our case, Mexican gambling regulation simultaneously. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\u2018That collision is not the death of prediction markets, I believe it’s the clearing of the field for operators who are already regulated and looking to add another string to their bow.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
What a licensed operator like ourselves can do today is a fixed-odds event contract product sitting firmly inside or next to an existing sportsbook. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don’t think we are creating a new instrument, but actually extending our current activity. The markets you can offer are the same events your risk team already prices: sports outcomes mainly, but also entertainment outcomes, structured world events where your sportsbook frameworks already govern settlement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The difference is in how you present it, how you price it, and how you engage the player, which is something I still think is evolving. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Regulators in Malta, Gibraltar, and even Sweden have shown that this framing works: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n- You stay inside your licence envelope<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- You run it through your existing AML and responsible gambling stack<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- You don’t touch anything that smells like a financial instrument or political betting in jurisdictions that prohibit it<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n\u2018This is the buildable, durable, regulatorily defensible version, and that’s what creates long-term commercial value.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
What actually separates this from sports betting<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nEG: A fixed-odds event contract offered under a sportsbook licence looks, to a sceptic, like sports betting with new branding. Beyond the label, what makes a <\/strong>prediction-market product<\/strong><\/a> genuinely different from the markets operators already run?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYoni Sidi:<\/strong> That’s a fair challenge, and I’d rather answer it directly than dodge it. The sceptic is partly right. If all you do is rebrand “Tottenham to win” (sorry, had to mention my team) as an “event contract,” you haven’t built a prediction market product. You’ve built a skin.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe genuine differentiation is in the mechanics, not so much the vocabulary. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n- A real prediction-market product has binary outcome structures<\/strong> \u2014 yes or no, not win\/draw\/lose with margin-heavy pricing across three outcomes. <\/li>\n\n\n\n
- It has transparent probability representation<\/strong>, so the player sees a 63% implied chance, not a carefully obscured 1.58 decimal that does the same thing with the margin buried inside it. <\/li>\n\n\n\n
- It offers in-play resolution on events within a match<\/strong>, not just match outcomes. <\/li>\n\n\n\n
- And critically, it has a social and informational layer, community positions, and market movement<\/strong>, which makes the product feel participatory rather than transactional.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Younger players, who, with advancements in modern technology, are becoming an ever more important target audience, don’t distrust gambling because of the risk, as this is clear to them from the outset, but they can distrust it because it feels rigged and opaque. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A prediction-market product that shows you the crowd’s \/ communities’ position, that explains why a price has moved, that settles on a verifiable fact, that rebuilds a trust relationship that traditional sportsbooks have seen eroded over twenty years of margin expansion and odds-compiler black boxes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s the real difference, and no amount of rebranding gets you there. You have to rebuild the product from the interaction model up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why the platform build is harder than operators think<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nEG: Wiztech sits on the platform side. What does a platform provider supply here that an operator couldn’t bolt on themselves: pricing, liquidity, settlement, or something else?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYoni Sidi:<\/strong> Operators underestimate build complexity here consistently, and it costs them. Let me be specific.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPricing is harder than it looks. Binary event contracts have a different risk profile from traditional sportsbook markets \u2014 the margin structure, the position management, and the real-time probability repricing model all need to be built from scratch or significantly adapted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most operators’ trading teams are optimised for three-way football pricing. They are not equipped to price a “will X happen before Y time” binary market and manage the book in real time without either leaving money on the table or overexposing themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then there’s the product layer: the presentation of market probability, the social mechanics, the notification architecture for market movement. None of this exists on a standard sportsbook platform, although I can see sportsbooks trying to make gradual shifts to keep up with the trend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What Wiztech provides is a pre-integrated stack where these components are already working together. An operator bolting this on themselves is looking at 12\u201318 months of development, a trading team re-skilling program, and a settlement framework built under production pressure. That’s the real cost comparison, not the licence fee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What Gibraltar’s licence really signals<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nEG: Gibraltar licensed PredictStreet under its gambling framework, and it <\/strong>went live on World Cup markets<\/strong><\/a>. What does that single move by a small jurisdiction actually mean for an operator weighing entry, if anything?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYoni Sidi:<\/strong> Gibraltar’s move matters more as a signal than as a passport. Let’s be clear about what it doesn’t do: it doesn’t give you access to France, Germany, the Netherlands or Sweden. Mutual recognition across those markets doesn’t follow from a Gibraltar licence, and anyone telling operators otherwise is misleading them.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat it does do is establish regulatory precedent. Gibraltar’s Licensing Authority made an explicit determination that a prediction-market product, structured correctly, fits within a gambling licence framework rather than a financial instruments framework. That’s a documented regulatory position that operators and their lawyers can now reference in conversations with other jurisdictions. It also gives Malta and the Isle of Man a worked example to follow without being the first mover, which matters enormously to how those regulators think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\u2018For an operator weighing entry, Gibraltar gives you an option to go live in a small, well-regarded regulatory environment, gather real product and player data under genuine supervision, and build a compliance track record before the larger jurisdictions decide how they want to regulate this. It’s a test bed with regulatory credibility.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
That’s genuinely valuable, not because Gibraltar unlocks Europe, but because operating evidence is what regulators in France and Germany will eventually want to see before they open their own frameworks, although that hasn’t always worked in the IGaming space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ESMA question hanging over the roadmap<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nEG: With ESMA leaning toward treating these as financial instruments, would you commit Wiztech’s roadmap and capital to a European prediction-market product right now?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYoni Sidi:<\/strong> ESMA’s posture is real, and it needs to be taken seriously. If prediction markets end up classified as financial instruments at the European level, the regulatory regime shifts entirely. You’re in MiFID territory, not gambling territory, and the compliance burden, potential capital requirements, and distribution restrictions change the economics of the product completely. I’m not dismissing that risk, but it needs to be considered.<\/p>\n\n\n\nEven though ESMA’s leaning isn’t settled law, the outcome will depend significantly on product structure, settlement mechanics, and whether the underlying instruments are contingent on verifiable real-world events or whether they function as synthetic financial positions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\u2018Products built deliberately within gambling licence frameworks, on event outcomes rather than financial indices, have a defensible structural argument that they are not financial instruments. We’re building for that structure.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The commitment we’re making is to product architecture that can survive either regulatory outcome without a complete rebuild. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n- If it stays in gambling regulation, we’re positioned.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- If ESMA moves and specific jurisdictions follow, we need to think if we need to adapt the product structure for whichever European markets decide to create a licensed financial prediction market framework<\/a> instead. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Our aim was always to build correctly from the start, as best we can, and be prepared for any changes, and we would like to be as ahead of any curve as possible or at least just behind it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Genuine European demand, or a US-shaped headline?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nEG: You’ve pointed to prediction markets appealing to younger, mobile-first players. How much of the current momentum is real European demand, versus US headlines and operators hunting a new acquisition hook?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYoni Sidi:<\/strong> Both things can be true simultaneously.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe US Polymarket story is real, but I don’t think it’s overly relevant to European operator strategy. The US momentum is driven by a specific confluence: crypto-native users, a particular political cycle, and the enormous free media coverage, which has led to Polymarket becoming an official market maker for some of the top news outlets in the US. I don’t see too many of those conditions existing in the same form in Europe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\u2018If you’re building a European prediction-market product because you saw Polymarket’s volume numbers during the US election, I think you’re chasing the wrong signal.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The underlying European demand is real, but it’s coming from a different place. I see it most clearly in our Mexico operation, which has strong demographic parallels to Southern European markets in terms of mobile penetration and younger player profile. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Under-35 players engage differently with binary event formats \u2014 the informational framing, the community positioning aspect, the sense that you’re exercising judgment rather than just accepting a price. That’s not manufactured by US headlines. That’s a genuine behavioural shift that’s been building for several years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The risk for European operators is building a prediction-market product that’s actually designed to generate press releases and investor slide decks, rather than to solve a real acquisition and engagement problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You could argue we have seen this happen with esports betting, with crypto payments, with a dozen other innovations that got bolted onto existing platforms without genuine product thinking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The demand is there. But you have to build for the European player, not for the headline story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Big operators could win this, if they choose to<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nEG: If Europe does open up, why wouldn’t the incumbent sportsbook operators, who already hold the licences and the customers, simply absorb the whole opportunity?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYoni Sidi:<\/strong> They might. If they have the resources, it could come down to how far they want to push the boat out. That’s the honest answer. And if I’m sitting across the table from a B2B client, I need to give them that answer rather than the reassuring version.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe incumbents have real structural advantages: existing regulatory relationships, established player bases, balance sheets that can absorb longer development timelines, and trading teams that can be tweaked. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\u2018If bet365, Flutter, or Entain decide that prediction markets are a genuine strategic priority, they have the resources to build or acquire their way to a credible product.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
How far do they want to push the boat out on a new product?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The question is whether they will. Large operators optimise for what works at scale right now. Prediction markets would probably require cannibalising some traditional sportsbook margin \u2014 the transparent probability model directly competes with the opacity that funds their current sportsbook economics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It requires a different product philosophy, a different CRM approach, and a different kind of risk management. It could be that the larger organisations resist that kind of internal disruption even when they can see the opportunity clearly. If it’s not broken, don’t try to fix it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As always, the window is narrow \u2014 probably three to five years before the large operators fully commit \u2014 but I think it’s real, and for mid-tier operators willing to move earlier, the player acquisition economics should be better before the big budgets arrive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sidi’s advice before you build anything<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n![\"Sidi's](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/media.europeangaming.eu\/uploads\/2026\/07\/3-steps-before-launching-a-prediction-market-.jpg?resize=800%2C1433&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nEG: Last one, if an operator came to you tomorrow wanting to launch a prediction-market product in Europe, what’s the first thing you’d tell them?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYoni Sidi:<\/strong> Are you sure? And Why? Not because I want to put them off, but because the worst version of this story is building a product, going to market, and then realising that it sits outside your current capabilities to acquire or position the product. <\/p>\n\n\n\nI don’t want people to take the product just because of a trend they are seeing. This is a product with real potential and needs to be taken seriously, not just another product to bolt on and see what happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once you have that internal confirmation, the second thing I’d tell them is: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\u2018<\/strong>Don’t start with sports. Start with entertainment \u2014 awards, elections where permitted, competition formats that aren’t directly mapped to sporting events you already have a traditional betting product on.\u2019 <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\nIt lets you develop your settlement infrastructure, your probability presentation, and your player communication model without cannibalising your core book or confusing your existing sportsbook customers. You build operational competency in a lower-risk commercial environment, then you bring that learning into the sports product, which is a good learning curve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the third thing, which no one wants to hear, is that the product has to actually be different from your sportsbook<\/strong>. Not in name. In the interaction model. <\/p>\n\n\n\nIf your prediction-market launch is a reskin of your existing bet interface with binary markets and different decimal formatting, you’ve wasted your budget, and you’ll have nothing to show for it twelve months later except a feature footnote in your product. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Treat it like a separate product, with its own visual language, its own social mechanics, its own player journey. The operators who do that will own this category. The ones who don’t will have funded a competitor’s case study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
About Wiztech Group<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nWiztech Group<\/a> is a B2B iGaming platform provider headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus, and part of Widemind Holdings. Its platform covers player account management, CRM and payments technology alongside its recently added prediction markets offering, and its operator network includes Mexican brand Winpot. Yoni Sidi has been the chief executive officer since January 2022.<\/p>\nThe post Yoni Sidi, Wiztech Group: ‘The window is narrow’ on Europe’s prediction markets<\/a> appeared first on European Gaming Industry News<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"Wiztech](\"https:\/\/media.europeangaming.eu\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Yoni-Sidi-Wiztech-Group-The-window-is-narrow-on-Europes-prediction-markets-1.jpg\")
In an interview with European Gaming, Wiztech Group chief executive Yoni Sidi explains what a genuinely licensed European\u2026<\/p>\n
The post Yoni Sidi, Wiztech Group: \u2018The window is narrow\u2019 on Europe\u2019s prediction markets<\/a> appeared first on European Gaming Industry News<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":2,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nYoni Sidi, Wiztech Group: \u2018The window is narrow\u2019 on Europe\u2019s prediction markets - Events by HIPTHER<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/hipther.com\/events\/yoni-sidi-wiztech-group-the-window-is-narrow-on-europes-prediction-markets\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Yoni Sidi, Wiztech Group: \u2018The window is narrow\u2019 on Europe\u2019s prediction markets - 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Building inside the licence, not around it<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nEuropean Gaming (EG)<\/strong>: The peer-to-peer exchange model that made Polymarket famous is exactly what France, the Netherlands and others have <\/strong>moved to block<\/strong><\/a>. When you talk about a commercial opportunity in Europe, what specifically can a licensed operator build today that a regulator won\u2019t shut down?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYoni Sidi:<\/strong> The opportunity isn’t to replicate Polymarket. It never was. Polymarket’s model, open P2P exchange, crypto settlement, politically sensitive markets, no KYC, was always going to collide with European financial and, in our case, Mexican gambling regulation simultaneously. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\u2018That collision is not the death of prediction markets, I believe it’s the clearing of the field for operators who are already regulated and looking to add another string to their bow.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
What a licensed operator like ourselves can do today is a fixed-odds event contract product sitting firmly inside or next to an existing sportsbook. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don’t think we are creating a new instrument, but actually extending our current activity. The markets you can offer are the same events your risk team already prices: sports outcomes mainly, but also entertainment outcomes, structured world events where your sportsbook frameworks already govern settlement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The difference is in how you present it, how you price it, and how you engage the player, which is something I still think is evolving. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Regulators in Malta, Gibraltar, and even Sweden have shown that this framing works: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n- You stay inside your licence envelope<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- You run it through your existing AML and responsible gambling stack<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- You don’t touch anything that smells like a financial instrument or political betting in jurisdictions that prohibit it<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\n\u2018This is the buildable, durable, regulatorily defensible version, and that’s what creates long-term commercial value.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
What actually separates this from sports betting<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nEG: A fixed-odds event contract offered under a sportsbook licence looks, to a sceptic, like sports betting with new branding. Beyond the label, what makes a <\/strong>prediction-market product<\/strong><\/a> genuinely different from the markets operators already run?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYoni Sidi:<\/strong> That’s a fair challenge, and I’d rather answer it directly than dodge it. The sceptic is partly right. If all you do is rebrand “Tottenham to win” (sorry, had to mention my team) as an “event contract,” you haven’t built a prediction market product. You’ve built a skin.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe genuine differentiation is in the mechanics, not so much the vocabulary. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n- A real prediction-market product has binary outcome structures<\/strong> \u2014 yes or no, not win\/draw\/lose with margin-heavy pricing across three outcomes. <\/li>\n\n\n\n
- It has transparent probability representation<\/strong>, so the player sees a 63% implied chance, not a carefully obscured 1.58 decimal that does the same thing with the margin buried inside it. <\/li>\n\n\n\n
- It offers in-play resolution on events within a match<\/strong>, not just match outcomes. <\/li>\n\n\n\n
- And critically, it has a social and informational layer, community positions, and market movement<\/strong>, which makes the product feel participatory rather than transactional.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Younger players, who, with advancements in modern technology, are becoming an ever more important target audience, don’t distrust gambling because of the risk, as this is clear to them from the outset, but they can distrust it because it feels rigged and opaque. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A prediction-market product that shows you the crowd’s \/ communities’ position, that explains why a price has moved, that settles on a verifiable fact, that rebuilds a trust relationship that traditional sportsbooks have seen eroded over twenty years of margin expansion and odds-compiler black boxes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s the real difference, and no amount of rebranding gets you there. You have to rebuild the product from the interaction model up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why the platform build is harder than operators think<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nEG: Wiztech sits on the platform side. What does a platform provider supply here that an operator couldn’t bolt on themselves: pricing, liquidity, settlement, or something else?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYoni Sidi:<\/strong> Operators underestimate build complexity here consistently, and it costs them. Let me be specific.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPricing is harder than it looks. Binary event contracts have a different risk profile from traditional sportsbook markets \u2014 the margin structure, the position management, and the real-time probability repricing model all need to be built from scratch or significantly adapted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most operators’ trading teams are optimised for three-way football pricing. They are not equipped to price a “will X happen before Y time” binary market and manage the book in real time without either leaving money on the table or overexposing themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then there’s the product layer: the presentation of market probability, the social mechanics, the notification architecture for market movement. None of this exists on a standard sportsbook platform, although I can see sportsbooks trying to make gradual shifts to keep up with the trend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What Wiztech provides is a pre-integrated stack where these components are already working together. An operator bolting this on themselves is looking at 12\u201318 months of development, a trading team re-skilling program, and a settlement framework built under production pressure. That’s the real cost comparison, not the licence fee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What Gibraltar’s licence really signals<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nEG: Gibraltar licensed PredictStreet under its gambling framework, and it <\/strong>went live on World Cup markets<\/strong><\/a>. What does that single move by a small jurisdiction actually mean for an operator weighing entry, if anything?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYoni Sidi:<\/strong> Gibraltar’s move matters more as a signal than as a passport. Let’s be clear about what it doesn’t do: it doesn’t give you access to France, Germany, the Netherlands or Sweden. Mutual recognition across those markets doesn’t follow from a Gibraltar licence, and anyone telling operators otherwise is misleading them.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat it does do is establish regulatory precedent. Gibraltar’s Licensing Authority made an explicit determination that a prediction-market product, structured correctly, fits within a gambling licence framework rather than a financial instruments framework. That’s a documented regulatory position that operators and their lawyers can now reference in conversations with other jurisdictions. It also gives Malta and the Isle of Man a worked example to follow without being the first mover, which matters enormously to how those regulators think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\u2018For an operator weighing entry, Gibraltar gives you an option to go live in a small, well-regarded regulatory environment, gather real product and player data under genuine supervision, and build a compliance track record before the larger jurisdictions decide how they want to regulate this. It’s a test bed with regulatory credibility.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
That’s genuinely valuable, not because Gibraltar unlocks Europe, but because operating evidence is what regulators in France and Germany will eventually want to see before they open their own frameworks, although that hasn’t always worked in the IGaming space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ESMA question hanging over the roadmap<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nEG: With ESMA leaning toward treating these as financial instruments, would you commit Wiztech’s roadmap and capital to a European prediction-market product right now?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYoni Sidi:<\/strong> ESMA’s posture is real, and it needs to be taken seriously. If prediction markets end up classified as financial instruments at the European level, the regulatory regime shifts entirely. You’re in MiFID territory, not gambling territory, and the compliance burden, potential capital requirements, and distribution restrictions change the economics of the product completely. I’m not dismissing that risk, but it needs to be considered.<\/p>\n\n\n\nEven though ESMA’s leaning isn’t settled law, the outcome will depend significantly on product structure, settlement mechanics, and whether the underlying instruments are contingent on verifiable real-world events or whether they function as synthetic financial positions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\u2018Products built deliberately within gambling licence frameworks, on event outcomes rather than financial indices, have a defensible structural argument that they are not financial instruments. We’re building for that structure.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The commitment we’re making is to product architecture that can survive either regulatory outcome without a complete rebuild. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n- If it stays in gambling regulation, we’re positioned.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- If ESMA moves and specific jurisdictions follow, we need to think if we need to adapt the product structure for whichever European markets decide to create a licensed financial prediction market framework<\/a> instead. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Our aim was always to build correctly from the start, as best we can, and be prepared for any changes, and we would like to be as ahead of any curve as possible or at least just behind it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Genuine European demand, or a US-shaped headline?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nEG: You’ve pointed to prediction markets appealing to younger, mobile-first players. How much of the current momentum is real European demand, versus US headlines and operators hunting a new acquisition hook?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYoni Sidi:<\/strong> Both things can be true simultaneously.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe US Polymarket story is real, but I don’t think it’s overly relevant to European operator strategy. The US momentum is driven by a specific confluence: crypto-native users, a particular political cycle, and the enormous free media coverage, which has led to Polymarket becoming an official market maker for some of the top news outlets in the US. I don’t see too many of those conditions existing in the same form in Europe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\u2018If you’re building a European prediction-market product because you saw Polymarket’s volume numbers during the US election, I think you’re chasing the wrong signal.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The underlying European demand is real, but it’s coming from a different place. I see it most clearly in our Mexico operation, which has strong demographic parallels to Southern European markets in terms of mobile penetration and younger player profile. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Under-35 players engage differently with binary event formats \u2014 the informational framing, the community positioning aspect, the sense that you’re exercising judgment rather than just accepting a price. That’s not manufactured by US headlines. That’s a genuine behavioural shift that’s been building for several years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The risk for European operators is building a prediction-market product that’s actually designed to generate press releases and investor slide decks, rather than to solve a real acquisition and engagement problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You could argue we have seen this happen with esports betting, with crypto payments, with a dozen other innovations that got bolted onto existing platforms without genuine product thinking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The demand is there. But you have to build for the European player, not for the headline story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Big operators could win this, if they choose to<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nEG: If Europe does open up, why wouldn’t the incumbent sportsbook operators, who already hold the licences and the customers, simply absorb the whole opportunity?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYoni Sidi:<\/strong> They might. If they have the resources, it could come down to how far they want to push the boat out. That’s the honest answer. And if I’m sitting across the table from a B2B client, I need to give them that answer rather than the reassuring version.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe incumbents have real structural advantages: existing regulatory relationships, established player bases, balance sheets that can absorb longer development timelines, and trading teams that can be tweaked. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\u2018If bet365, Flutter, or Entain decide that prediction markets are a genuine strategic priority, they have the resources to build or acquire their way to a credible product.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
How far do they want to push the boat out on a new product?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The question is whether they will. Large operators optimise for what works at scale right now. Prediction markets would probably require cannibalising some traditional sportsbook margin \u2014 the transparent probability model directly competes with the opacity that funds their current sportsbook economics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It requires a different product philosophy, a different CRM approach, and a different kind of risk management. It could be that the larger organisations resist that kind of internal disruption even when they can see the opportunity clearly. If it’s not broken, don’t try to fix it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As always, the window is narrow \u2014 probably three to five years before the large operators fully commit \u2014 but I think it’s real, and for mid-tier operators willing to move earlier, the player acquisition economics should be better before the big budgets arrive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sidi’s advice before you build anything<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\nEG: Last one, if an operator came to you tomorrow wanting to launch a prediction-market product in Europe, what’s the first thing you’d tell them?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYoni Sidi:<\/strong> Are you sure? And Why? Not because I want to put them off, but because the worst version of this story is building a product, going to market, and then realising that it sits outside your current capabilities to acquire or position the product. <\/p>\n\n\n\nI don’t want people to take the product just because of a trend they are seeing. This is a product with real potential and needs to be taken seriously, not just another product to bolt on and see what happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once you have that internal confirmation, the second thing I’d tell them is: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\u2018<\/strong>Don’t start with sports. Start with entertainment \u2014 awards, elections where permitted, competition formats that aren’t directly mapped to sporting events you already have a traditional betting product on.\u2019 <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\nIt lets you develop your settlement infrastructure, your probability presentation, and your player communication model without cannibalising your core book or confusing your existing sportsbook customers. You build operational competency in a lower-risk commercial environment, then you bring that learning into the sports product, which is a good learning curve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the third thing, which no one wants to hear, is that the product has to actually be different from your sportsbook<\/strong>. Not in name. In the interaction model. <\/p>\n\n\n\nIf your prediction-market launch is a reskin of your existing bet interface with binary markets and different decimal formatting, you’ve wasted your budget, and you’ll have nothing to show for it twelve months later except a feature footnote in your product. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Treat it like a separate product, with its own visual language, its own social mechanics, its own player journey. The operators who do that will own this category. The ones who don’t will have funded a competitor’s case study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
About Wiztech Group<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nWiztech Group<\/a> is a B2B iGaming platform provider headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus, and part of Widemind Holdings. Its platform covers player account management, CRM and payments technology alongside its recently added prediction markets offering, and its operator network includes Mexican brand Winpot. Yoni Sidi has been the chief executive officer since January 2022.<\/p>\nThe post Yoni Sidi, Wiztech Group: ‘The window is narrow’ on Europe’s prediction markets<\/a> appeared first on European Gaming Industry News<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In an interview with European Gaming, Wiztech Group chief executive Yoni Sidi explains what a genuinely licensed European\u2026<\/p>\n
The post Yoni Sidi, Wiztech Group: \u2018The window is narrow\u2019 on Europe\u2019s prediction markets<\/a> appeared first on European Gaming Industry News<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":2,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nYoni Sidi, Wiztech Group: \u2018The window is narrow\u2019 on Europe\u2019s prediction markets - Events by HIPTHER<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/hipther.com\/events\/yoni-sidi-wiztech-group-the-window-is-narrow-on-europes-prediction-markets\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Yoni Sidi, Wiztech Group: \u2018The window is narrow\u2019 on Europe\u2019s prediction markets - 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Yoni Sidi:<\/strong> The opportunity isn’t to replicate Polymarket. It never was. Polymarket’s model, open P2P exchange, crypto settlement, politically sensitive markets, no KYC, was always going to collide with European financial and, in our case, Mexican gambling regulation simultaneously. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018That collision is not the death of prediction markets, I believe it’s the clearing of the field for operators who are already regulated and looking to add another string to their bow.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n What a licensed operator like ourselves can do today is a fixed-odds event contract product sitting firmly inside or next to an existing sportsbook. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t think we are creating a new instrument, but actually extending our current activity. The markets you can offer are the same events your risk team already prices: sports outcomes mainly, but also entertainment outcomes, structured world events where your sportsbook frameworks already govern settlement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The difference is in how you present it, how you price it, and how you engage the player, which is something I still think is evolving. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Regulators in Malta, Gibraltar, and even Sweden have shown that this framing works: <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018This is the buildable, durable, regulatorily defensible version, and that’s what creates long-term commercial value.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n EG: A fixed-odds event contract offered under a sportsbook licence looks, to a sceptic, like sports betting with new branding. Beyond the label, what makes a <\/strong>prediction-market product<\/strong><\/a> genuinely different from the markets operators already run?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yoni Sidi:<\/strong> That’s a fair challenge, and I’d rather answer it directly than dodge it. The sceptic is partly right. If all you do is rebrand “Tottenham to win” (sorry, had to mention my team) as an “event contract,” you haven’t built a prediction market product. You’ve built a skin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The genuine differentiation is in the mechanics, not so much the vocabulary. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Younger players, who, with advancements in modern technology, are becoming an ever more important target audience, don’t distrust gambling because of the risk, as this is clear to them from the outset, but they can distrust it because it feels rigged and opaque. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A prediction-market product that shows you the crowd’s \/ communities’ position, that explains why a price has moved, that settles on a verifiable fact, that rebuilds a trust relationship that traditional sportsbooks have seen eroded over twenty years of margin expansion and odds-compiler black boxes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s the real difference, and no amount of rebranding gets you there. You have to rebuild the product from the interaction model up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n EG: Wiztech sits on the platform side. What does a platform provider supply here that an operator couldn’t bolt on themselves: pricing, liquidity, settlement, or something else?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yoni Sidi:<\/strong> Operators underestimate build complexity here consistently, and it costs them. Let me be specific.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pricing is harder than it looks. Binary event contracts have a different risk profile from traditional sportsbook markets \u2014 the margin structure, the position management, and the real-time probability repricing model all need to be built from scratch or significantly adapted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Most operators’ trading teams are optimised for three-way football pricing. They are not equipped to price a “will X happen before Y time” binary market and manage the book in real time without either leaving money on the table or overexposing themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then there’s the product layer: the presentation of market probability, the social mechanics, the notification architecture for market movement. None of this exists on a standard sportsbook platform, although I can see sportsbooks trying to make gradual shifts to keep up with the trend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What Wiztech provides is a pre-integrated stack where these components are already working together. An operator bolting this on themselves is looking at 12\u201318 months of development, a trading team re-skilling program, and a settlement framework built under production pressure. That’s the real cost comparison, not the licence fee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n EG: Gibraltar licensed PredictStreet under its gambling framework, and it <\/strong>went live on World Cup markets<\/strong><\/a>. What does that single move by a small jurisdiction actually mean for an operator weighing entry, if anything?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yoni Sidi:<\/strong> Gibraltar’s move matters more as a signal than as a passport. Let’s be clear about what it doesn’t do: it doesn’t give you access to France, Germany, the Netherlands or Sweden. Mutual recognition across those markets doesn’t follow from a Gibraltar licence, and anyone telling operators otherwise is misleading them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What it does do is establish regulatory precedent. Gibraltar’s Licensing Authority made an explicit determination that a prediction-market product, structured correctly, fits within a gambling licence framework rather than a financial instruments framework. That’s a documented regulatory position that operators and their lawyers can now reference in conversations with other jurisdictions. It also gives Malta and the Isle of Man a worked example to follow without being the first mover, which matters enormously to how those regulators think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018For an operator weighing entry, Gibraltar gives you an option to go live in a small, well-regarded regulatory environment, gather real product and player data under genuine supervision, and build a compliance track record before the larger jurisdictions decide how they want to regulate this. It’s a test bed with regulatory credibility.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n That’s genuinely valuable, not because Gibraltar unlocks Europe, but because operating evidence is what regulators in France and Germany will eventually want to see before they open their own frameworks, although that hasn’t always worked in the IGaming space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n EG: With ESMA leaning toward treating these as financial instruments, would you commit Wiztech’s roadmap and capital to a European prediction-market product right now?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yoni Sidi:<\/strong> ESMA’s posture is real, and it needs to be taken seriously. If prediction markets end up classified as financial instruments at the European level, the regulatory regime shifts entirely. You’re in MiFID territory, not gambling territory, and the compliance burden, potential capital requirements, and distribution restrictions change the economics of the product completely. I’m not dismissing that risk, but it needs to be considered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even though ESMA’s leaning isn’t settled law, the outcome will depend significantly on product structure, settlement mechanics, and whether the underlying instruments are contingent on verifiable real-world events or whether they function as synthetic financial positions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Products built deliberately within gambling licence frameworks, on event outcomes rather than financial indices, have a defensible structural argument that they are not financial instruments. We’re building for that structure.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The commitment we’re making is to product architecture that can survive either regulatory outcome without a complete rebuild. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Our aim was always to build correctly from the start, as best we can, and be prepared for any changes, and we would like to be as ahead of any curve as possible or at least just behind it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n EG: You’ve pointed to prediction markets appealing to younger, mobile-first players. How much of the current momentum is real European demand, versus US headlines and operators hunting a new acquisition hook?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yoni Sidi:<\/strong> Both things can be true simultaneously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The US Polymarket story is real, but I don’t think it’s overly relevant to European operator strategy. The US momentum is driven by a specific confluence: crypto-native users, a particular political cycle, and the enormous free media coverage, which has led to Polymarket becoming an official market maker for some of the top news outlets in the US. I don’t see too many of those conditions existing in the same form in Europe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018If you’re building a European prediction-market product because you saw Polymarket’s volume numbers during the US election, I think you’re chasing the wrong signal.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The underlying European demand is real, but it’s coming from a different place. I see it most clearly in our Mexico operation, which has strong demographic parallels to Southern European markets in terms of mobile penetration and younger player profile. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Under-35 players engage differently with binary event formats \u2014 the informational framing, the community positioning aspect, the sense that you’re exercising judgment rather than just accepting a price. That’s not manufactured by US headlines. That’s a genuine behavioural shift that’s been building for several years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The risk for European operators is building a prediction-market product that’s actually designed to generate press releases and investor slide decks, rather than to solve a real acquisition and engagement problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You could argue we have seen this happen with esports betting, with crypto payments, with a dozen other innovations that got bolted onto existing platforms without genuine product thinking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The demand is there. But you have to build for the European player, not for the headline story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n EG: If Europe does open up, why wouldn’t the incumbent sportsbook operators, who already hold the licences and the customers, simply absorb the whole opportunity?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yoni Sidi:<\/strong> They might. If they have the resources, it could come down to how far they want to push the boat out. That’s the honest answer. And if I’m sitting across the table from a B2B client, I need to give them that answer rather than the reassuring version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The incumbents have real structural advantages: existing regulatory relationships, established player bases, balance sheets that can absorb longer development timelines, and trading teams that can be tweaked. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018If bet365, Flutter, or Entain decide that prediction markets are a genuine strategic priority, they have the resources to build or acquire their way to a credible product.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n How far do they want to push the boat out on a new product?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The question is whether they will. Large operators optimise for what works at scale right now. Prediction markets would probably require cannibalising some traditional sportsbook margin \u2014 the transparent probability model directly competes with the opacity that funds their current sportsbook economics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It requires a different product philosophy, a different CRM approach, and a different kind of risk management. It could be that the larger organisations resist that kind of internal disruption even when they can see the opportunity clearly. If it’s not broken, don’t try to fix it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As always, the window is narrow \u2014 probably three to five years before the large operators fully commit \u2014 but I think it’s real, and for mid-tier operators willing to move earlier, the player acquisition economics should be better before the big budgets arrive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n EG: Last one, if an operator came to you tomorrow wanting to launch a prediction-market product in Europe, what’s the first thing you’d tell them?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yoni Sidi:<\/strong> Are you sure? And Why? Not because I want to put them off, but because the worst version of this story is building a product, going to market, and then realising that it sits outside your current capabilities to acquire or position the product. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t want people to take the product just because of a trend they are seeing. This is a product with real potential and needs to be taken seriously, not just another product to bolt on and see what happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once you have that internal confirmation, the second thing I’d tell them is: <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018<\/strong>Don’t start with sports. Start with entertainment \u2014 awards, elections where permitted, competition formats that aren’t directly mapped to sporting events you already have a traditional betting product on.\u2019 <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n It lets you develop your settlement infrastructure, your probability presentation, and your player communication model without cannibalising your core book or confusing your existing sportsbook customers. You build operational competency in a lower-risk commercial environment, then you bring that learning into the sports product, which is a good learning curve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the third thing, which no one wants to hear, is that the product has to actually be different from your sportsbook<\/strong>. Not in name. In the interaction model. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If your prediction-market launch is a reskin of your existing bet interface with binary markets and different decimal formatting, you’ve wasted your budget, and you’ll have nothing to show for it twelve months later except a feature footnote in your product. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Treat it like a separate product, with its own visual language, its own social mechanics, its own player journey. The operators who do that will own this category. The ones who don’t will have funded a competitor’s case study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wiztech Group<\/a> is a B2B iGaming platform provider headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus, and part of Widemind Holdings. Its platform covers player account management, CRM and payments technology alongside its recently added prediction markets offering, and its operator network includes Mexican brand Winpot. Yoni Sidi has been the chief executive officer since January 2022.<\/p>\n The post Yoni Sidi, Wiztech Group: ‘The window is narrow’ on Europe’s prediction markets<\/a> appeared first on European Gaming Industry News<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The post Yoni Sidi, Wiztech Group: \u2018The window is narrow\u2019 on Europe\u2019s prediction markets<\/a> appeared first on European Gaming Industry News<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":2,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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What actually separates this from sports betting<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Why the platform build is harder than operators think<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What Gibraltar’s licence really signals<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The ESMA question hanging over the roadmap<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Genuine European demand, or a US-shaped headline?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Big operators could win this, if they choose to<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Sidi’s advice before you build anything<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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About Wiztech Group<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
In an interview with European Gaming, Wiztech Group chief executive Yoni Sidi explains what a genuinely licensed European\u2026<\/p>\n