Alberta Online Gambling Launch Reflects Strong Start Ahead of Fall Sports: GeoComply

For Alberta’s first week of regulated online gambling, GeoComply registered over 3.2 million geolocation checks as users logged in or attempted to place wagers through its registered partners.

Fourteen of Alberta’s 22 day-one operators that went live when the market launched July 13 were enabled by GeoComply technology, the company said in an email to Gambling Insider. That customer count is expected to grow as more operators enter and expand their offerings in the new market.

Market expansion is already happening. 

This week, two Entain brands, Sports Interaction and PartyCasino, became the newest additions to Alberta’s nascent online market. Both could now be part of GeoComply’s customer lineup. BetMGM, another platform co-owned by Entain, is noted as a client on GeoComply’s website. 

Nonetheless, the company emphasized in a press release this is an early and not fully representative look at the Alberta market. It said it will continue to monitor the regulated market as it matures, with further insights to follow.

But given that GeoComply’s snapshot represents about 64% of Alberta’s day-one sites, it’s clear the launch was bigger than this initial data shows.

World Cup Spurs Betting Action in Alberta   

The final week of the FIFA World Cup drove much of Alberta’s first week volume, according to Anna Sainsbury, GeoComply’s co-founder and chair. Over 53,000 checks mapped back to the Spain vs. Argentina final last Sunday, July 19 at its peak.

“As a Canadian company, this one’s close to home,” Sainsbury said in a statement shared with the first-week snapshot.

Albertans were eager to expand their choices of safe, regulated ways to play, and the final matches of the World Cup gave us an immediate look at the market in action. More than 100,000 Albertans across the province signed up through GeoComply-enabled platforms and engaged with licensed operators right out of the gate. We’re proud that our Canadian team gets to help operators do it right in Alberta.”

Alberta’s first week results were broadly in line with its incoming expectations, a company spokesperson told us. Ontario, they said, remains the most relevant comparison, but there are key differences between the markets.

For one, Ontario launched just as the 2022 NHL playoffs began, providing a major customer engagement boost. By contrast, Alberta launched mid-summer, when, despite the World Cup, the sports calendar is “relatively quiet and overall betting activity tends to be lower,” the GeoComply representative added. Canada was eliminated from the World Cup with 3-0 loss to Morocco on July 4.

Also, Alberta’s population of around five million is less than a third as large as Ontario’s 16 million.

Said the spokesperson:

Taking those factors into account, we see Alberta’s launch as a strong starting point and expect engagement to build as the sports calendar picks up through the fall.” 

Risk-Based Verification Helped Keep Play ‘Safe and Seamless’

GeoComply also reported it experienced no downtime through the launch window. Further, 99.48% of the millions of logins and bets processed passed through the geolocation screening.

The majority of the remaining 0.52% was due to location masking, GeoComply said. That means “people trying to disguise their location or use tools to fake being in Alberta,” the rep clarified. 

Although 0.52% may sound small, it accounts for “thousands of transactions,” they added.

In other words, our fraud and spoofing defenses are working, identifying and blocking potential bad actors before they can access the market.”

That low fail rate has a lot to do with GeoComply’s risk-based Adaptive Verification technology. The launch offered the “first live look” of the tech in action via browser.

GeoComply told Gambling Insider it developed Adaptive Verification to answer a need for a “smarter, risk-based approach to location verification.” An approach “built for real-world scenarios, with less friction for legitimate players and more scrutiny where it really counts.”

GeoComply explained that while every check upholds the compliance standard, the “level of verification adjusts” based on the session’s risk profile. 

“Most legitimate players are verified seamlessly in the background using multiple signals that confirm their location and help distinguish real users from suspicious activity. If a session presents elevated risk, such as signs of location spoofing or other anomalous behavior, the system automatically steps up verification.”

This, they told Gambling Insider, is a “more responsive approach to compliance.”