Grace Media casinos

Grace Media (Gibraltar) Limited Information

Who are Grace Media (Gibraltar) Limited?

Grace Media Limited (or should that be Grace Media Gibraltar Limited?) is a company that’s done an awful lot in a very short space of time. It came from nowhere in 2019, set up shop in the UK, amassed a collection of more than one hundred casinos and iGaming sites, moved to Gibraltar, and then closed down most of its casinos. It takes most casino operators a decade or more to amass that kind of history of change. Whatever Grace Media is or isn’t, it’s clearly a company that’s in a hurry – and it’s the very definition of an “industry disruptor.”

While we might have said that Grace Media “came from nowhere,” that’s a turn of phrase. It clearly came from somewhere – and that specific “somewhere” was Manchester. This is an iGaming company with an interesting story behind it, and we’ll tell the story below.

An overview of Grace Media (Gibraltar) Limited

The present-day version of Grace Media (Gibraltar) Limited can be found in Gibraltar – or, at least, its theoretical head office can. It has an address listed in Hadfield House, which is the same address that’s used by quite a lot of casino network companies that have theoretical head offices in Gibraltar. It’s no secret that basing an iGaming company in Gibraltar is an awful lot cheaper from a taxation point of view than basing one in the United Kingdom, and that’s why you’ll find so many casino operators there. It’s perfectly legal for the operators to structure themselves this way, and it makes good business sense to do so.

At one point in its brief history, Grace Media operated more than 120 casinos, bingo sites and other iGaming sites, almost all of which ran on a white-label basis. Things have changed dramatically since then. The total number of iGaming sites that Grace Media is currently responsible for is closer to thirty, and even then, quite a few of those thirty are no longer available in the UK. We’ll take a closer look at the biggest and best casinos on the Grace Media platform a little further down this page, but before we do, let’s look at how it all began for this operator.

Grace Media history

Grace Media was incorporated in 2019, which is as good as yesterday in iGaming terms. The company’s first head office was on King Street in Manchester, which is considered the heart of the city and a desirable address. Although the “official” HQ of the company is in Gibraltar today, the Manchester office is still open, and that’s still where you’ll find nearly all of the operator’s employees. That presumably includes Warren Jacobs, Grace Media’s founder and CEO. He was no newcomer to the iGaming scene when he launched the company; he’s a veteran with many years of experience and is respected enough to be called upon as a judge for the Global Gaming Awards each year.

After setting up shop in 2019, Grace Media Limited truly set about its business the following year. By mid-2020, the operator had more than one hundred iGaming sites to its name. It would have been impossible for a big casino network company to come up with so many casinos in such a short space of time, let alone a startup, but that’s not how Grace Media grew so quickly. Instead, it took advantage of the closure of Nektan, which was formerly a large-scale casino operator. When Nektan’s former casinos and bingo sites became available to the highest bidder, Grace Media made the highest bid.

A change of address

With a UK Gambling Commission licence and a string of successful iGaming sites, everything appeared to be going well for Grace Media. That’s why it was a shock to many in the industry when the company voluntarily surrendered its UKGC licence in May 2022. That wasn’t Grace Media giving up the ghost, though; far from it. Instead, it was Grace Media preparing to take things to the next level. Two months before surrendering its original licence, Grace Media officially relocated to Gibraltar and applied for a new UK Gambling Commission licence under the new name of Grace Media (Gibraltar) Limited. The licence was awarded in March 2022 – so this was a move that was planned well in advance – and remains in force today.

Since then, there has been a spate of closures of Grace Media casinos. From the outside, it’s difficult to say whether this should be seen as a cause for concern or not. As we’ve said earlier, Grace Media is primarily a white-label casino operator. Almost all the casinos that have closed down were previously white-label. They could have been shut down by Grace Media because they were unprofitable, or they could have been shut down by the operator’s white-label partners because they wanted to get out of the iGaming business. In any event, the closure of so many sites must surely have resulted in a drop in income for the operator. The official Grace Media website is still touting for new white-label partners and advertising vacancies within the firm, though, so we presume that the company is still focused on moving forwards.

Grace Media (Gibraltar) Limited and the UK Gambling Commission

Those of you who’ve read our company profile of Grace Media above will be aware that the operator has a UK Gambling Commission licence. In fact, it’s onto its second UK Gambling Commission licence, with a second licence obtained after the company changed both its name and its address in 2022. The account number for the new licence is 57869. The licence is clean, with no fines or other regulatory incidents on record. While you could argue that the company hasn’t had much time to blot its copybook after obtaining the licence in March 2022, we should point out that its previous licence was also clean right up until the point when it was surrendered.