Mr Viral
The new licences permit Yolo to supply iGaming content in the UAE.
Yolo Group has secured gaming-related vendor licences in the United Arab Emirates for its Hub88 Holdings and Live Online Gaming Services subsidiaries.
The licences permit Yolo to supply iGaming content to the regulated market in the UAE. Both permits were issued by the General Commercial Gaming Regulatory Authority, an independent entity of the UAE government.
In securing the licences, Live88 will become the first online live casino studio to be approved in the region. Yolo said product development and testing will remain in Estonia before it scales across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.
The UAE is the first jurisdiction in the GCC region to regulate gambling.
“Obtaining these licences in the UAE is more than a regulatory achievement,” Yolo founder Tim Heath said. “It is a statement of intent. Yolo Group is committed to building the future of gaming on trust, transparency and world-class innovation.
“The UAE is setting the stage for what modern, regulated gaming should look like and we are proud to be part of that journey.”
Regulated market focus for Yolo Group
The new UAE licences form part of Yolo’s pivot towards regulated markets. Previously, the company was heavily focused on unregulated crypto casino but recently changed tack.
This came with confirmation it will incorporate its Sportsbet and Bitcasino brands into the single Yolo.com brand. Yolo said the primary aim is to bring Yolo.com to Tier-1 regulated markets. This followed a three-year process of research and preparations for the shift.
“The direction is clear: the regulated landscape is the future of gaming and we’re ready to lead with the same fearless innovation that got us here,” the company said at the time of the announcement.
However, Juan Ignacio Ibañez, general secretary of the MiCA Crypto Alliance, raised certain questions over the switch. Speaking to iGB, he said entering regulated markets is not just a case of paying a licence fee.
“You might think getting a licence is just a fact of spending an amount of money on the law firm and telling them to go get it,” Ibañez said. “But it turns out that you need to actually adapt your processes a lot, right?
“In order to be able to report a lot of the items that you need to report in the process of getting a licence, you need to change your own internal processes, or set up processes that you didn’t have before. So organisationally, it is quite transformative to get ready to operate in a regulated market. It really changes how you function and your team.”
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