On 7 January 2021, the Ministry of the Interior requested comments on a proposal for reforming the Lotteries Act, which regulates gambling in Finland. The key points of the proposal include preventing the harm caused by gambling in an effective manner, combating marketing that violates the Lotteries Act, and securing Veikkaus Oy’s capacity to effectively channel the consumer demand for gambling.

Veikkaus Oy has announced that it will extend customer identification requirement to all gambling games. The identification requirement would start to apply to other gambling games by the beginning of 2023 at the latest and to scratch cards at the beginning of 2024.

From the horserace betting point of view the significant changes are:

  • Clearer rules for International commingling:
  • what and how the regulator supervises activity
  • how to deal with different rules, for example merged pools
  • More marketing regulations for betting products, including Tote betting

Since beginning of 2017, Veikkaus observed a status quo in commingling because the monitoring process has not been defined by the Ministry of Interior.

Now it has been stated as one of the goals of new legislation process is to define the monitoring process for international commingling.

No defined timeline for that work for the moment.