ONE-ON-ONE
People person: Corinne Valletta, Betsson IN THE LATEST ONE-ON-ONE INTERVIEW WITH GAMING LAW LEADERS, EDITOR IN CHIEF, DR. SIMON PLANZER INTERVIEWED THE GENERAL COUNSEL OF BETSSON. THEY TALKED ABOUT THE CHALLENGES OF THE JOB AND THE PRESSURES ON IN-HOUSE TEAMS AS WELL AS THE ASPECTS OF HER ROLE THAT SHE FINDS EXCITING.
Simon Planzer: What has kept you busy this year?
CV: Malta is a gaming hub, at least in Europe, and as a result, you’ve got really quite a strong ecosystem supplying what is needed to make a gaming business successful. And that includes the sorts of employees you need. And not only Maltese. You have game marketing people, you have gaming law people, you have gaming tech people, and product people from all over the world. If they’re in gaming, they know that at some point they need to be in Malta. But each year, new companies set up here too, and that means there is a lot of competition for the right people. It has become a constant drive to have the best conditions, the best benefits, and the best packages, including competitive salaries. You’ve got a lot of startups and small companies aside from the larger ones like Betsson, and small companies can be very aggressive with very high salary budgets since they set up smaller teams. When you have a team of 50 or 60, you cannot pay them all high-tier salaries, it’s unsustainable. But we are competing with those companies,
Corinne Valletta: From a business perspective, there are lots of priorities, but growth is high on the agenda. If you look across the entire group, we’re expanding quite ambitiously, especially in South America, and we have around 20 licenses within Europe. So there’s quite a lot going on. How that affects me as Betsson General Counsel may not be what you are expecting because my biggest challenges are around people. A big part of my job is making sure that I have the right team in place to cope with that growth, and that has been very intense. The team has grown to around 60 people, which makes sense when you consider how many jurisdictions we have to cover, but in a place like Malta where we are based, that is quite large. Simon Planzer: Malta is known as a global gaming hub but are there currently enough qualified people locally to meet business needs?
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IMGL MAGAZINE | SEPTEMBER 2024
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