Betway casinos

Betway Limited Information

Who are Betway Limited?

The market for sports betting in the UK is enormously crowded. Plenty of companies that are successful elsewhere in Europe or the wider world have tried to muscle in on it and found that there’s no way to gain a foothold. That’s why Mansion Bet (and, indeed, the entire Mansion group of iGaming websites) have withdrawn from the UK. Common sense tells you that the companies that currently enjoy the most success in the sports betting market are those that have been around since the early days and thereby managed to capture and maintain a decent market share. There are, however, exceptions to every rule.

Betway Limited is a big name – one that you’ll almost certainly have heard of if you’re interested in sports betting, in fact – but it’s not been around for anything like as long as most people assume it to have been. Betway was, in fact, founded in Malta in 2006, by which time the idea of placing bets online had well and truly taken hold. Being late to the party hasn’t meant that Betway Limited hasn’t been able to make a success of itself, though – so let’s take a closer look at how it did it.

An Overview of Betway Limited

We’ve already given you two pieces of key information about Betway Limited’s operations; the company was founded in Malta and has been around since 2006. It didn’t stay in Malta for long, though. The company has expanded aggressively since its foundation and now has offices in Cape Town (South Africa), Guernsey, and London to go with its original head office. The number of locations where it holds offices is dwarfed by the number of territories it holds licences for, though.

In addition to its all-important UK Gambling Commission licence, Betway holds licences that allow the company to offer its iGaming services and platforms in Malta, Denmark, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Mexico, Sweden, South Africa, Poland, France, and several other countries. It even has a licence allowing it to operate in certain parts of the United States of America, which is a whole new world of opportunities as far as sports betting companies are concerned. As of the time of writing, the company has a presence in several states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, Colorado and New Jersey.

Gaining Visibility through Sponsorships

A few paragraphs ago, we mentioned how difficult it is for new sports betting companies to gain a foothold in the UK market. It’s only possible if you’ve got the marketing budget to play for some seriously high-profile sponsorships – and even that might not be enough. Paying to sponsor the shirts of Premier League football teams is the fastest way to get your brand name out there in front of an audience of millions, but it will soon no longer be an option after gambling and football agreed to end their relationship after pressure from politicians and campaigners. Betway, however, has had plenty of visibility that way already.

When you visit the homepage of Betway Limited – not to be confused with the homepage of Betway, which is a casino site operated by Betway Limited – one of the first things you’ll notice is an image of a West Ham United player proudly wearing their team’s home shirt with the Betway name and logo printed on it. The relationship between Betway and West Ham has been a long and strong one, and both sides will presumably be sorry to see it forced to come to an end. Betway is probably especially happy that West Ham’s players have worn the shirts while competing in European competitions, thus guaranteeing even more visibility.

Football is probably the most important of the avenues that Betway Limited has exploited for marketing, but it’s not the only channel it’s funnelled advertising money into. The National Hockey League (NHL) in the US and Canada has also been sponsored by Betway in the past, as has the South African Twenty20 Cricket League.

Setting Records

Every casino and betting site needs players to believe that it’s possible to win money while playing there. If players don’t believe that, the betting company will never have any customers. That’s why such companies are sometimes happy when someone wins big while playing with them – it’s another opportunity to generate some positive publicity. If the big win makes the news, it’s the equivalent of free marketing. Betway experienced this in 2015, when it paid out a jackpot win which, at the time, broke a world record.

Jon Heywood, a UK-based player who consented to being named by the press, was playing Microgaming’s Mega Moolah when he had his life-changing win. The slots game has long been known to players as “the millionaire maker” because of the colossal jackpot that the game sometimes pays out when the wind is fair, and so it proved to be the case yet again for Jon. The total value of his jackpot, which came from a single spin, was £13.2m. The Guinness Book of World Records verified it as a world record, which stood for four years before being surpassed by an even bigger win elsewhere in 2019. This wouldn’t be the only time that Betway broke a record, but the next time it happened, it was one that the company wished it had never come anywhere near.

Betway and the UKGC

We’ve already told you that Betway Limited holds a full licence with the UK Gambling Commission. It’s licence number 39372, and it’s been in force since November 2014. It is, however, a long way from being clean. The UKGC has had cause to take disciplinary action against Betway Limited twice in recent years, and the second time it happened, it was the record-breaking event that we referred to a paragraph ago.

In 2019, headlines began to appear in newspapers about big-name betting companies using their “VIP” reward and membership schemes to encourage high-rollers to spend enormous amounts of money. Betway was one of the companies mentioned in these reports. Deciding that this was, for once, the kind of publicity that it could do without, Betway disbanded its former VIP rewards schemes that same year. It was too late, though; the UK Gambling Commission had commenced a regulatory review. In March 2020, the UKGC announced the results of that review and confirmed that it had identified multiple historical failings in the way that it protected its customers from themselves and from the risk of money laundering. In one of the instances cited in the review, a single customer had been allowed to spend more than £8m at Betway over four years, losing £4m of it.

Betway was issued with a warning and had new, additional conditions attached to its licence following the review, which was to be expected given the severity of the failings. However, what made the headlines and broke records was the size of the fine that the regulator dished out to Betway Limited as punishment. It was £11.6m, which was the largest fine the UKGC had ever handed out at that point.

Betway spent the next couple of years trying to patch up its reputation, including introducing a voluntary ban on bets related to player transfers or changes of management in football, believing that such markets were rife with corruption and insider tips. However, any hope of wiping the slate clean was removed in September 2022 when the company received a second UKGC fine. This time, the fine was for breaches of marketing regulations. The UKGC decided that Betway’s marketing wasn’t being undertaken in a socially responsible manner, for which it was fined £408,915. The only positive is that the size of the fine was a drop in the ocean compared to the one it was slapped with two years earlier.