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Brazil’s gambling regulator has confirmed that licensed operators will be able to migrate current players to their Brazilian platforms as a new regulatory regime kicks in on January 1.
The Ministry of Finance’s Secretariat for Prizes and Bets (SPA) published an ordinance on Tuesday (November 26) to set out the conditions under which current offshore operators can transfer players’ account data and funds to their soon-to-be licensed Brazilian sites.
Among other criteria, only those operators that submitted a licence application prior to a September 17 enforcement deadline will be eligible to migrate the accounts of their established players and operators must apply for specific permission to do so from the SPA prior to December 13.
Players must give their express consent for their account balances to be transferred. They also must register and complete authentication checks for their new accounts in accordance with Brazilian regulations, including through facial recognition.
In a statement, the SPA said the rules related to account migrations would increase protections for players, ensuring compliance with Brazilian data protection laws.
“This is yet another step towards the start of a regulated market on January 1, 2025,” the SPA added.
Tuesday’s ordinance had been keenly anticipated by Brazil-facing operators that are frantically preparing to go live on day one of the regulated market at the turn of the year.
Per a May licensing decree, the SPA is in the process of notifying a first tranche of operators whether their applications have been successful, enabling them to move to the next stage of the process that requires payment of an upfront fee of R$30m (US$5.3m) and submitting technical certifications, among other steps.
The SPA has not yet disclosed exactly how many of the 114 applications submitted before an August deadline have been deemed approved, with some thought to still be undergoing further review by the Ministry of Sport.
However, more than a dozen operators from Entain’s Sportingbet to Philippines-based DigiPlus have made public statements in recent days to that effect. On Monday, Superbet issued a statement claiming to be the first company to also make payment of the R$30m licensing fee.
The ordinance on player accounts follows an earlier SPA ordinance of November 5 that mapped out the steps successful applicants should take to duly register the .bet.br domain name they must use in Brazil’s legal market.
Separately, the regulator has advised that it will not immediately enforce its expectation for all online casino games to automatically display a paytable on-screen once the player enters the game.
As highlighted by Vixio’s Technical Compliance Tool, the SPA will allow for an “intermediate solution” so that games initially just have to clearly display where the paytable can be viewed by the player, provided that the game is recertified as meeting the automatic-display requirement within 90 days of launch.
The SPA last week said that the flexibility was necessary “to allow for the offering of a reasonable quantity of online games in the regulated market from January 1, 2025”.
