According to international statistics, the gambling market is constantly expanding, and current estimates indicate a market value of approximately $ 73.5 billion by 2024. The chances of reaching this threshold are extremely high given that gambling is legalized in most countries, and technological progress is exponential thanks to new smartphones and tablets, as well as a permanent expansion of the Internet.
In 2015, Romania developed one of the best laws in the field of gambling, which had beneficial consequences: safety for players, consistent revenues to the state budget, and creation of new jobs. The Romanian gambling market is estimated at a whopping one billion euros ($ 1.13 billion), generating approximately 45,000 jobs and over 300 million euros in taxes for the state budget.
The future of this field is closely linked to the level of responsibility and social involvement of the organizers, and a collaboration between the legislator and the industry lead to initiatives to modernize the legislative framework, with positive effects on customers, authorities, and organizers.
At the legislative level, the focus is at the moment on the Law 129/2019, which transposes the European directive against money laundering.
The new legislation on preventing and combating money laundering brings in a series of obligations for gambling operators. Very important is to retrieve personal data for people who record earnings of at least 2,000 euros in a single operation, which means legitimizing customers with the identity card. Traditional gambling companies will be required to ask customers to present a copy of the identity document upon collection of amounts greater than 2,000 euros, or to equip the locations with devices for copying them in physical or digital format. If the lowering of the mandatory reporting threshold to ONPCSB, from 15,000 euros to 10,000 euros, does not have an administrative impact on the organizers, however, they have the obligation to identify the holders and to report transactions in much smaller amounts, and 100 lei, if they fulfill the conditions to be classified as suspicious transactions. All these new obligations require additional training of employees, implementation of specific procedures and even hiring of additional staff.
In other news, this year has had a rather difficult start for the gambling industry, in view of the provisions of the Government Emergency Ordinance no. 114/2018 regarding the increase in gambling fees and, implicitly, on the major impact it has had on the profile market. However, the companies in the industry have managed to recover and comply with the new legislative changes in the field without having substantial changes in operation.
