With Finland’s state monopoly ending on 1 July 2027, Finnish players face an entirely new casino environment. How should they prepare – and what do comparison platforms actually check?
Ask a Finnish consumer what they look for when picking an online casino and the answer is almost always the same: bonuses and whether the site’s in Finnish. Maybe the game selection. That’s about it – nobody checks licensing jurisdiction. Nobody reads the wagering requirements on a welcome offer before they deposit.
While Veikkaus ran the monopoly that didn’t matter much. The alternative was offshore sites, Finnish regulators couldn’t touch them, and consumers picked on vibes. From July 2027 the situation is completely different. Finland’s parliament voted 158 to 9 in December 2025 to open online casino games and betting to private operators.
Twenty-four have already filed licence applications. Soon there could be 40 or 50 licensed options to pick from and a consumer who’s still comparing on bonus size alone is going to end up in trouble. Understanding what is actually examined in casino comparisons matters now in a way it didn’t before.
Read on for what’s changing and where Finnish consumer information still falls short.
Veikkaus Is Already Losing Ground
Blask, a gambling analytics firm that tracks brand search interest by market, caught this happening in Q1 2026. Veikkaus’ brand accumulated power – a normalised measure of search demand – fell from 72.49% to 60.87% year on year. Twelve percentage points gone. Coolbet jumped to third place nationally. Epicbet appeared at fifth. Mr Green cracked the top ten for the first time.
Veikkaus reckons it controls 20–25% of Finland’s online casino segment, according to Antti Koivula speaking to iGaming Business. Koivula was a Finnish gambling lawyer at the time and is now chief compliance officer at Hippos ATG, one of the new licence applicants. Sports betting is even thinner at around 10%. The monopoly technically exists, though the word has been working overtime for very little reality over the past half decade.
Parliament wants to recover an estimated €600–900 million a year that’s been going to operators licensed in Malta and Estonia. Those platforms weren’t breaking Finnish law by accepting Finnish players. They also had zero obligation to follow Finnish rules on deposit limits, self-exclusion, or responsible gambling, and they didn’t.
What the New Framework Actually Does
Under the new Gambling Act, operators apply for B2C gambling licences covering betting and online casinos, or B2B software licences for developers whose products licensed operators use. Five-year terms. A flat 22% GGR tax, plus annual supervisory fees from €4,000 up to €434,000. From July 2028 every operator needs to run on software from a licensed provider, too.
Affiliate marketing is banned. So are influencer promotions and acquisition bonuses. Denmark and Sweden didn’t go this far when they opened up, and whether Finland’s stricter approach actually helps channelisation or just pushes comparison traffic offshore is something nobody will know for at least a couple of years.
New entrants don’t get any of what Veikkaus has. Veikkaus enters with 2.7 million registered customers and a brand in every petrol station and supermarket in Finland. Koivula told iGaming Business anything above 30% of the market for Veikkaus would be “a considerably positive surprise” and below 20% “could be catastrophic.” The marketing rules prevent incoming operators from compensating with aggressive digital spend, so the imbalance is structural.
What Comparison Sites Actually Look At
In early 2026 the comparison site CasinoIndex (operating since 2020) restructured its ranking methodology around withdrawal reliability rather than bonus size. That’s a reversal of how the industry has ranked casinos for as long as comparison sites have existed. The majority of ranking sites haven’t followed, which tells its own story about how the comparison space actually works in practice.
Licensing jurisdiction is the thing consumers ignore and the thing that matters the most. An MGA licence and a Curacao licence look identical on a casino’s signup page but MGA operators face real audits and real fines for withholding payouts. Curaçao has been tightening up since its 2023 reform, though the gap is still wide.
In Finland specifically, payment methods are a bigger deal than elsewhere – Trustly-based “pay and play” casinos have basically taken over and if a casino doesn’t support instant bank deposits, Finnish players don’t stick around.
Catalogue size on its own doesn’t tell a consumer much. What matters is which studios are behind the games – a catalogue heavy on NetEnt and Play’n GO signals something different from one padded with developers nobody outside the industry has heard of.
Finnish-language customer support is easy to check and worth checking. Actual Finnish speakers on live chat versus a chatbot running through Google Translate, and anyone who’s dealt with a stuck withdrawal through a chatbot already knows how that goes.
After July 2027 Finnish-licensed operators will need to integrate a centralised self-exclusion register covering all licensees. Offshore operators don’t have that. It’s one of the easiest ways to tell whether a casino is licensed domestically.
A €500 welcome offer with a 40x wagering requirement and a seven-day expiry is not generous, it’s a trap dressed up with a ribbon on it. Max bet caps during bonus play and game weighting percentages can turn what looks like a good deal into a terrible one, and operators bury this deep in their T&Cs because spelling it out would cost them signups.
A few comparison platforms dig this stuff out and present it clearly. Plenty of them don’t.
The Information Gap
Here’s the strange part. Finland’s new framework bans affiliate marketing, which means comparison sites can’t partner with Finnish-licensed operators. They can still partner with EEA-licensed operators outside the domestic framework though, so the platforms that could undermine the very comparison infrastructure that consumers rely on are the ones left operating without any restriction at all.
Finnish gambling consultants have been pointing this out for over a year and nobody in the legislative process seems to have had a good answer.
Sweden’s 2019 re-regulation is worth looking at. Overall channelisation got to around 85%, which is close to the 90% target. Online casino is a different story – that segment fluctuates between 72% and 82%, and it’s exactly the segment where affiliates and comparison sites have the biggest influence over where players end up.
Finland’s regulators know this. The affiliate ban suggests they drew a different conclusion from the data than most of the industry did.
Jari Vähänen of Finnish Gambling Consultants Oy made the point in December 2025 that Finns have one of the highest per-capita gambling rates in the world. That money will go wherever the information channels point, regulated or not.
What Finnish Players Should Actually Look For
Licence jurisdiction is the first thing to check and probably the only thing that most Finnish players currently skip entirely. After July 2027, Finnish-licensed operators are bound by local self-exclusion rules and deposit limits, plus AML compliance.
EEA-licensed operators are legal to play at but if something goes wrong – a withheld payout, a disputed bonus, a frozen account – there’s no Finnish regulator to take it to.
Trustly integration and bank transfer speed matter. Finnish-language KYC matters. Payment infrastructure predicts actual player experience far better than whatever bonus is on the homepage, and once the B2B licensing requirement kicks in from July 2028 the software behind each operator needs its own licence too. Comparison platforms should be flagging all of this. At the moment, barely any of them are.
Finland’s gambling reform was overdue, the market had already liberalised itself without consumer protections attached. Whether the new framework pulls offshore spend back into regulated channels depends partly on whether Finnish consumers can find comparison tools that are independent enough and detailed enough to actually be useful. Right now that’s not a given.
