While many companies vie for attention with flashy stands, one operator at SBC Summit Lisbon chose a quieter, yet deeply cultural, approach: building a proper wood-panelled, sauna-inspired conference room.
This unusual setting highlights Fennica Gaming’s roots and its belief that, in Finland, important business decisions are made in the heat of the steam room. This commitment to Finnish culture is integral to their business approach, spreading throughout their products, games, and the way they conduct business.
Expanding on this distinct approach, Fennica Gaming, which operates as the B2B arm of the state lottery of Finland, Veikkaus, is charting a course for global expansion by exporting its unique “Finnish way” of building games.
At the recent SBC Summit in Lisbon, SBC’s Multimedia Journalist, caught up with Jonas Reuter, Chairman of the board of Fennica Gaming, to discuss the company’s recent entry into the competitive iCasino vertical and its international licensing strategy.
Veikkaus has operated lottery, iGaming, and land-based gaming in Finland for 80 years, providing Fennica with deep internal knowledge built on player data.
Fennica Gaming was granted the licence three years ago to offer products that were traditionally built in-house for the Finnish market to other territories. The company first took its e-instant and soft games outside Finland two and a half years ago and has since launched into 17 countries, noting that the success of these games has been “quite striking”.
The company is now making the “quite natural step” into the iCasino vertical, leveraging the large portfolio that previously contributed a significant portion of Veikkaus’s domestic revenue. To facilitate this expansion, Fennica has productified its cloud-based remote gaming server (RGS), which was previously only used for its domestic operations, making it adaptable for other operators.
While monitoring how North America evolves, Fennica’s initial market focus is primarily Europe. However, the company is already building an international footprint, having secured a licence in Ontario and planning expansion into Quebec shortly, as Reuter views Canada and Europe as quite similar markets.
Reuter asserted that what truly makes Fennica Gaming stand out is its commitment to being highly regulated, describing the company as the “Nordics of the Nordics”.
They maintain a “no bad bets” history, meaning they have zero history of operating in markets where they should not be. Fennica believes the entire industry is moving towards stricter regulation, and its operational playbook is built to thrive in these heavily regulated environments.
Looking to the future, the Finnish operator market is set to open in 2027, and Veikkaus is preparing for this change. Fennica Gaming’s international strategy is intrinsically linked to this domestic shift: by finding more partners, growing scale, and gaining an international footprint, the company aims to maintain its dominant market position in Finland even after the market opens to international operators and B2B providers.
