Building a platform for LatAm, between the buzzwords

Hugo Baungartner remembers the day in 2004 when slot machines were banned in Brazil. He was in his early twenties and had been working as a slot machine technician since he was legally allowed to at the age of 18, assembling and installing slot machines and verifying game functionality — before his skillset became obsolete overnight.

But the São Paulo native stuck by the industry and was there when, over two decades later, Brazil’s regulated online gambling market launched in January 2025 to significant industry fanfare.  

“We are in Latin America – things sometimes happen in a way that you don’t think or believe they will,” says Baungartner, who is now the chief business officer at leading Brazilian operator group Esportes Gaming Brasil. 

In the years leading up to that launch, a significant portion of the global gaming industry’s attention was spent on how they could grab a slice of what was considered the largest market opening since the US Supreme Court repealed PASPA in 2018.

As almost any attendee of an industry trade show over the past few years can attest, supplier brands have spent copious time and effort producing reams of advertising and sales pitches and thought leadership on how to build the right tools to succeed in Brazil and LatAm more broadly. 

Something certainly seems to have worked. Brazil generated $7 billion in GGR in its first full year, and the wider LatAm region (including the Caribbean) reached over $35 billion GGR in 2026, per H2 Gambling Capital data. That is an almost tripling of GGR in LatAm from $12.4 billion since the start of the decade – a compound annual growth rate of 26%. 

But to what extent have ‘built for LatAm’ tools fuelled that growth? As the region continues to grow and new LatAm markets flirt with potential openings, what lessons should be learnt from Brazil? And if we peer beyond the usual marketing fluff, what do we really know about building an iGaming platform for LatAm? 

What makes a good LatAm platform? 

When it comes to designing platforms for LatAm, it is not necessary to reinvent the wheel, but smoothing out the bumps is important for a region that has proved such a bumpy ride.

LatAm has been a hotbed for regulatory change ever since Colombia became the first Latin American country in South America to legislate for online gaming in 2016. It has undergone a remarkable transformation away from grey and black markets into a largely, although unevenly, regulated region.

Yet near-weekly instability threatens best-laid plans. In Brazil, the President and his political party are tightening restrictions and hiking taxes just a year and a half after legalisation. In Colombia, emergency consumption taxes have caused major volatility for operators, and in Peru a similar emergency tax is threatening its licensed sector.

In-house speed

The Esportes Gaming Brasil group, which owns Brazilian brands Esportes da Sorte and Onabet, launched its third brand LOTTU last August, built on a bespoke in-house solution. It uses a hybrid model, with the core platform source code provided by NGX, on top of which the group built its own proprietary development layer.

Within the Brazilian market, LOTTU is designed to appeal to more experienced bettors, with a focus on UX, efficiency and responsiveness. Baungartner says modifying the new brand’s platform in-house was vital to meeting these requirements, with speed of adaptability a key priority. 

“For LOTTU, the approach is basically a technology structure designed to accommodate continuous adjustments in a dynamic environment, meaning speed. The defining factor is not just the platform itself, but how quickly it can be adapted to market changes and user expectations.” 

Brazil in particular is a crowded field. As of May 2026, there are now 85 licence holders active in the country, with each one permitted to operate up to three brands. The scale of competition is putting pressure on operators to prioritise flexibility. 

“We’ve had 15 months of regulation, and still we are in a moment where the market is maturing with strong competition, so we need fast speed on anything that needs to be developed,” Baungartner adds. 

“[LOTTU’s] structure allows us to do continuous adjustments to the user journey. We can manage any promotion, any tool, interface, engagement strategy, without compromising the core.”

Platform-operator fit

Industry consultant Ramiro Atucha offers similar advice to his clients. He tells iGB that aside from the obvious qualities you’d look for in any platform (compliance, stability, usability), adaptability and customisation are king. 

“It needs to be customised for the market, it needs to have the right languages, it needs to have the right vendors – but also the right support and relationship between the platform and the operator, which sometimes is a big challenge when the management is removed from the platform.” Atucha goes on to explain that the relationship between an operator and platform provider is particularly important in LatAm markets.  

“A common problem that happens is you’ve got larger platform [providers] focused mainly on tier one’s or sometimes tier two’s, and the challenge they have is that in an emerging market like Latin America, whoever is a tier two now or a startup today, could be a big operator in two to three years’ time. 

“So it’s very challenging for them to really understand who to focus on, what type of service to provide them. It is a bit of a challenging process for larger platforms to enter Latin America and provide the right service.” 

Another mistake from major platforms, he continues, is adopting a one-platform-fits-all approach. He says most major platforms want to have one platform and one team sorting everything across all markets, but this can lead to bottlenecks. 

“By definition, they will prioritise the market where they’re making the most money and they won’t be able to customise for the ones where they need to. I think a multi-platform approach is something that big suppliers at some point are going to need to start considering.” 

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How well have suppliers ‘built for LatAm’? 

The idiosyncrasies that define Latin American gambling markets have been well covered. Young, football-mad, mobile-first, e-wallet dependant, small-but-high-volume play – the list goes on. But as the dust settles on major milestones like Brazil’s market launch, how successfully have platform providers adapted products to fit the needs of a diverse and dynamic region?  

For Dario Leiman, head of business development for Latin America at SOFTSWISS, it’s a bit of a mixture. There’s always something new to adapt to, he says, so there will never be such thing as a finished LatAm product, but he has also witnessed gaps in delivery in the platform space in LatAm.

“I always see competitors advertise that they have all these [LatAm-specific functionalities], but then you talk to customers on their platform and they admit it’s not doing everything that’s advertised or only doing it half as well” Leiman notes. “An example is the integrated KYC – in Brazil, probably very few are working correctly, or at least there is a lot of friction when onboarding until the player passes KYC.” 

One move SOFTSWISS made to adapt to the region’s myriad cultural differences is to build a core platform architecture that supports regional templates. These templates support things like local languages through to Netflix-style regional filters that allow operators to surface games or game types they want for their geo, like placing crash games top in Brazil or video bingo top for Mexico. 

In Leiman’s eyes, scalability is one of the top priorities in Latin America, one which he says SOFTSWISS has prioritised. “We’ve got a modular structure that enables the platform to grow alongside the operator’s business. In Brazil, in the first days, we’ve seen companies that grew a lot, but the platform went down more and more – it didn’t scale with them.” 

Combining tech and local knowledge

Atucha also sees the suitability of LatAm-tailored platforms as a bit of a mixed bag. “You either get experienced platform providers from Europe, the US, that have strong technology, strong team capability, experience – but they are not adapted to Latin America,” he explains. 

“The biggest challenge they have is that even though LatAm is very promising, they’re still making bigger money in other countries. So at the end of the day, when they are working with one technical team, it doesn’t matter how good they are, it always ends up being a matter of priorities. It becomes a bit chicken and egg.

“If you do not prioritise because you’re not making enough money from Latin America, you will never make enough money because you’re not customising and adapting to that. That’s the main problem you get with international suppliers.”

On the other hand, Atucha says local platforms in LatAm are better adapted, with more boots on the ground and better market familiarity. But the flipside is that they often lack a long history building technology or iGaming specific capabilities. 

He cites Rush Street Interactive as one particularly admirable example of an operator that has gotten both sides of the equation right. “They managed to combine the two things, having strong technology that has passed all the requirements of a very competitive market like the US, but they have also taken the time to enter, digest, understand, respect the culture of each [LatAm] country they are entering. They are entering small and growing from there.” 

Localisation: Buzzwords vs reality 

Make any mention of LatAm in the platform space and localisation is the most likely buzzword to follow. Few would deny it is a necessity, but not everyone is convinced it’s being delivered on the ground to the scale it has been promised. Baungartner says that localisation does exist but is often surface level. He thinks the most important form of localisation is when it comes to content. 

“Back in the day, Brazil was a very video bingo-oriented country. I remember 10-15 years ago, seeing people try to have operations in Brazil without video bingo. It didn’t work. So it’s important to make localisation not only about language but also content. There is content that works really well in Brazil that doesn’t work anywhere else.” 

Atucha meanwhile is sceptical that localisation has been implemented effectively yet in LatAm, by platforms or by operators. “I don’t think there’s a lot of implementation yet of that customisation,” he says. “To me customisation is not so much about language or product, it’s about really understanding where the player is at.” 

He gives the example of Colombia post regulation, where the prevailing narrative was that Colombian players liked sports betting and did not like slots. “The idea was that they had a different DNA, you know. But a few years later, they suddenly liked slots, but only simple slots. And a few years later they are playing the same games everyone is playing.  

“Same thing used to happen in Brazil with sportsbook,” Atucha continues. “We used to say Brazilian players did not like the complex sportsbooks that you have available in the UK. Again, it was just a learning curve – start with something simpler, because of course they do not have a long bookie history like the UK.

“In my opinion the biggest element of localisation is not putting mariachis and maracas on a Mexican site, it is understanding what their history of playing is, what games they used to play.” 

Future of platforms in a changing region 

The regulatory volatility that dominates headlines in Latin America’s gaming industry is one of the leading causes of headaches for those developing platform technology for deployment in the region. 

According to Atucha, the best defence is a pre-emptive one. He says one of the best ways to future-proof operations and tech stacks is for operators to self-regulate themselves to some extent in order to avoid the kind of public backlash that foments stricter regulation. 

He explains: “The moment you have issues with the casinos getting to the newspapers, then, of course, the regulators come out stronger against the industry. Self-awareness and self-regulation go a long way, and we’re seeing good initiatives there in Brazil, Argentina and different places.”

Strong enough to bend

Nonetheless, while iGaming legislation in Latin America is overall trending in a positive direction, regulatory roadblocks are unavoidable. Rather than lamenting the injustice of it, many leading companies are preparing by prioritising technology that can adapt quickest. 

“Scalability and flexibility are key things to prioritise in a platform in order to not be locked into poor tech for the future,” says SOFTSWISS’ Leiman.

Baungartner says flexibility is especially important in Brazil where the regulatory regime is young, fluid and increasingly marked by uncertainty. He cites LOTTU’s partly-in-house platform development capabilities as integral to adjusting offerings quickly. “Having the technology in our hands gives us the flexibility and speed that is needed right now,” he says. 

Regulation aside, the only way to predict the future is to keep both eyes on the market. Baungartner and Leiman both say they are constantly looking at player behaviour and the competition to understand how demand is changing. 

In an industry with needs as diverse as in gaming, however, it is hard to please everybody. “No one is happy with their platform,” Atucha quips. “I remember I think it was an event in New York where the speaker asked all operators who were happy with their platform to raise their hand – no one raised their hand.” 

But as the dust settles on a much-hyped region, with Brazil’s launch now firmly in the rear-view mirror, it is becoming easier to separate the wheat from the chaff. After much marketing noise, actions now speak louder than words, and the core tenets of a strong LatAm platform are becoming clearer.

Jake Nordland

Jake is an experienced trade journalist with a background in the video game, esports & gambling industries. He covers emerging trends in the global gaming industry, mostly compliance, regulation, and tech topics.

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