What iGaming Suppliers Actually Document About Licences

The median iGaming supplier documents three gambling licences on its own website. Across the 44 platform providers and 67 game studios in the iGamingHub catalog, 5 platforms and 11 studios document none at all, and only 3 suppliers of either kind publish more than six. That is a much shorter answer than the licensing slide in most vendor decks, and the gap between the two is the thing worth understanding before you sign anything.

The point is not that suppliers are lying. It is that "licensed in 20 markets" and "holds 20 licences" are different sentences, and vendor material routinely uses the first to imply the second. A platform can be perfectly legitimate in twenty countries while holding almost no licences of its own, because in most of those countries the licence obligation belongs to the operator.

Platforms and studios carry different obligations, and it shows

Split the catalog by supplier type and the licence profiles diverge in a way that maps precisely onto who is legally on the hook.

Studios sit far higher on the national regulators. Just over half document a Swedish licence against a fifth of platforms, 46% document Romania's ONJN against a quarter, and a quarter document a UKGC licence against 11%. Platforms are the ones concentrated on Curacao, at 45% against 16%.

That is not a quality gap. It follows from where the obligation lands. A slot or live studio supplying a regulated market usually needs its own permission there: Britain requires a gambling software operating licence from the UK Gambling Commission to supply games to licensed operators, and Sweden, Romania and Italy run comparable supplier regimes with their own technical approval. The studio cannot hide behind its customer. A platform selling a turnkey stack usually can, because the operator applies for the B2C licence and the platform is a supplier to it. Its own paperwork only has to cover the places where it is the licensee, which is often a much shorter list.

This is also why a thin platform licence list is weak evidence of anything. Sportradar documents no gambling licence on its card and is a listed company supplying regulated books across dozens of markets. The information simply is not the same information.

Where the licence question actually bites

The practical version of the question changes depending on which model you are buying, which is the axis the white label and turnkey comparison is built around.

On a white label you rent the provider's licence. Its list is your list, and every jurisdiction missing from it is a jurisdiction you cannot trade in. Only five platforms in the catalog still sell a pure white label, so this case is narrower than it was, but where it applies the licence list is the product.

On a turnkey deal you hold the licence and the platform is a vendor. Its own list matters much less than whether it has been certified against your regulator's technical standards, which is a separate document from a licence and one almost nobody publishes. The platform selection guide treats that as a question for the shortlist call rather than the website.

For content, the studio's list is the one that governs. If a studio has no Swedish licence, its games do not go live on your Swedish site whatever your own licence says, and the operator carries the consequence. The supplier licence definition in our glossary sets out the scope.

Two tiers, and almost nobody in the middle

Of the 39 platforms that document any licence, 31 document at least one of MGA, UKGC, SGA, Gibraltar, Alderney or the Isle of Man, and 21 document an offshore licence from Curacao, Anjouan, Kahnawake or the Comoros. Twenty platforms hold both, which is the normal shape: an offshore licence for speed and a European one for the markets that require it. Only two document offshore permissions alone.

Curacao's presence on 45% of platform cards is the single most common non-Maltese entry, and it is worth reading in the context of the jurisdiction's reform. The National Ordinance for Games of Chance replaced the old master-and-sublicence structure, and existing holders were pulled onto direct licences with real reporting duties, which is covered in the Curacao licence guide. A Curacao licence issued under the new regime is a different instrument from a 2019 sublicence, and a card that says only "Curacao" does not tell you which one you are looking at.

At the other end, Malta's position is unsettled in a way that a licence list cannot express: Article 56A of the Gaming Act and the enforcement fight around it, tracked in the Bill 55 analysis, affects what an MGA licence is worth for cross-border trade rather than whether the supplier holds one.

What this means for your vendor check

Three things follow, and none of them require you to distrust the supplier.

Ask who is the licensee for each market on your list. Not "are you licensed", which always gets a yes, but "in market X, is the licence yours or mine, and if it is mine, what do you need to be certified against?" The answer separates a vendor that has done the work from one that has done the slide.

Ask for the licence number and check the register. Every regulator that matters publishes one. The Malta Gaming Authority and the UK Gambling Commission both run public licensee searches, and a two-minute check settles what a page of marketing copy cannot. Licence pages move faster than sales decks, and a supplier's own site is often months behind its own status.

Treat an absent licence as a question, not a verdict. Sixteen suppliers in the catalog document nothing, and they range from a listed data company to a five-person studio. What the absence tells you is that the answer lives somewhere other than the website.

For anyone comparing jurisdictions before applying rather than checking a vendor, the offshore licensing comparison covers what each tier costs to hold and how long it takes.

Methodology and sources

Counts come from the iGamingHub catalog as of September 2026: 44 platform provider cards and 67 game studio cards, all with an active listing. A licence is counted when the supplier's own public material states it as a licence held, using the wording the site itself uses. Percentages are of all cards in each group, including those documenting nothing, and the medians quoted are across suppliers that document at least one.

The numbers are deliberately conservative, and lower than they were a week ago. Until September 2026 our scrapers matched jurisdiction names anywhere in a vendor's page text, which meant a markets list, a footer or a case-study headline could be recorded as a licence. That produced an identical seven-jurisdiction block on eleven platform cards and put the Netherlands on 19 of 44, neither of which survives contact with the Dutch supplier register. The matcher now requires the page to state the licence, and every entry that had no such statement behind it was removed rather than left in place. One card, listing 27 jurisdictions, is still under review and is excluded from no figure here but should be read with that caveat.

What this means for the numbers above: they undercount. A supplier that holds a licence and does not say so publicly is counted as documenting nothing, which is the correct treatment for a question about disclosure and the wrong one for a question about legal status. Anyone needing the second should use the regulators' registers, which are the only authority on it.