the room starting now with new markets, perhaps the best advice that I could give them is to be sure that they make flexible regulation at the time of regulating. You need to be flexible, because one part of the tragedy of this story is that you cannot innovate anymore in this industry because the definitions were too prescriptive in our Gaming Act. And like any other jurisdiction, to change an act, you need months, perhaps years and you need months to change a decree, you need weeks to change different regulatory tools. So the more flexible the regulation, the better for this industry, as this is an industry where products evolve quickly. We have a client who came to the firm with a fantastic idea for a product, and we studied it and saw quickly that it is not possible to be developed because the definition of that product in the regulation does not match with that idea, It would have probably disrupted the market, pleased consumers and made this client very successful but it stays on the drawing board. So, regulations should be more flexible and we should hope for a u-turn in the current trend for the restrictive policies that the industry is suffering. Otherwise, I believe that a mature regulated market like mine, or perhaps yours will decline. Perhaps there are three more years, five more years of activity with opportunities for others to enter but I’m not optimistic. QM: Neither am I. Now, switching to Germany which is newer to the magic world of gaming regulations. It all started out with the interstate treaty a few years ago. And then things happened as a result of massive judicial actions. And now there is at long last a licensing system that is slowly taking place, so to speak. So your perspective, Wolf is quite different from ours so you hopefully will add some color to this otherwise quite flat discussion. WH: Thank you, Quirino. Color indeed. I would start with the colors blue, red, and white, the flag colors of the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and the colors red and white, which is the Danish dynamite, as we call it. What is unsaid concerning channelization and a successful authority is that you have to build up a team. And this happened in 2011, more than 10 years ago, in the Schleswig-Holstein Parliament where they had a consultation, a lot of discussions in the legislature as to which kind of model they are going to choose. They have chosen the Danish model because it was a sound model. They had a consultation professionally organized before licenses were issued but after the regulation was introduced. So before the activation of licenses, meaning that it brought together the industry and the regulator, and especially the new staff members that are responsible for different areas and take care of license conditions. It was successful in terms of channelization as, after one year if you look at the betting shops, all those that had no license have been closed. Professor Anna Wenger from the Institute for Therapy and Gambling Addiction in northern Germany did a study and said that after the opening up of the market and issuing of licenses there had been no change in problem gambling. So it was successful from that point of view. In terms of sound regulation, essentially it’s rehashed from a successful model and this is how it is on a national level, because if you have one successful state, the government in the end can decide the direction. As Matthias pointed out earlier we have 16 regulators which makes life difficult, of course. But we started well. There was no limitation of the number of licenses as in the UK, as in Spain, which is good. There is no bad actor clause so that you can issue licenses to operators who have been active in the market before. You need to be fit and proper, and able to comply with the regulations and many licenses have been issued so this is really a success story in Germany from 16 competent states, to issue so many licenses. So that is really good, a success story in a difficult political climate. The big question now is what happens next. It’s great to see the regulator, Mr Schwanke here and as was said by Birgitte Sand earlier, the regulators and the authorities have to get out and to talk to the industry, to talk to the experts, to improve on the regulation because the regulation can always be improved and the authority can always be improved, The operators can also be improved. But how? That’s the big question. I have heard the question about lobbying earlier. Yes, you can say that lobbying is dangerous, and that the industry should be silent or the regulators are on a slippery slope. But again as Birgitte said, the important thing is to be transparent, be open. And in the end, it’s up to the discretion of the regulator and the legislature, to decide how to
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