The 2026 World Cup has arrived, and with it, the most demanding onboarding test the iGaming industry has faced. Financial services firm Maguire projects the tournament will be the biggest betting event of all time, with more than $50 billion in wagers placed globally and around 500 million bets per match.

In a webinar hosted by SBC, Payment Expert News Editor Louis Thompsett sits down with Philipp Pointner, Chief of Digital Identity at Jumio, Liam Smith, Head of Player Protection at Lottoland, and Greg Papanastasiou, Chief Risk and Compliance Officer at Play North, to explore why the player journey must go beyond basic identity verification if operators want to turn a six-week tournament into long-term user trust.

Absorbing the Spike

For Lottoland, the World Cup presents a particular kind of pressure. 

Smith described the tournament as “quite unique, both in the breadth and scale of it,” as the 104 matches, played across roughly 40 days, leads to an influx of leisure customers who might have zero prior relationship with the operator. 

Alongside this, time zone differences across the host cities means an extension of trading windows, creating late-night play patterns that add further complexity to compliance operations.

For Jumio, the challenge is amplified by the fact that traffic spikes don’t arrive one operator at a time, “We see the traffic increase for all the operators at the same time,” said Pointner, “So it all comes to us.” 

To prepare for the spike in users, Jumio ensured every component of its system was on auto-scaling, implementing pre-warming strategies for predictable peak moments, such as match kick-offs and final whistles, where biometric authentication requests can surge simultaneously.

Smith’s view on managing the surge was more measured: “Don’t do anything different. What you’re doing should be strong and stable anyway.” The key, he argued, is anticipating where the pinch points are across the entire chain. 

Legacy Systems as the Real Limiting Factor

Thompsett put a question to the group, asking whether the limiting factor in scaling was technology or operational teams. Smith pointed to something less discussed: legacy systems. 

“There’s lots of technology available now,” Smith said, “but you’re always trying to integrate with legacy systems – player management systems, databases and everything else.” This can create a bottleneck as even the best-in-class tools are throttled by fragmented infrastructures.

Pointner reinforced the point from a vendor perspective, noting that the industry’s challenge isn’t the availability of technology but the depth of its integration. 

He went on, saying how operators working with Jumio are encouraged to communicate expected traffic volumes ahead of major events so infrastructure can be prepared accordingly. “Work closely with your vendors,” he advised, “let us know what you expect in terms of traffic and when.”

Securing the Player Lifecycle

A recurring theme throughout the session was that identity verification at the point of sign-up is only the beginning. 

Papanastasiou described identity intelligence as a business enabler rather than a compliance cost. “Switch the paradigm,” he said. “These are requirements, but they can be used in the right way as a business enabler to maximise onboarding and the customer experience while maintaining compliance.”

Smith echoed this, describing how Lottoland deploys a sophisticated risk-scoring system that tracks player behaviour throughout the sporting lifecycle gathering information on how they bet, when they cash out, and what broader patterns emerge across their activity. 

In a high-volume sporting context, he noted, “everything’s magnified. There are many more variables.”

Fraud at this Scale

Player numbers of this size during major events unsurprisingly leads to an increase in fraud vectors.

Papanastasiou pointed to bonus abuse and account takeovers as the two most prominent, highlighting how AI-driven bot activity has made both significantly harder to counter. “It’s a 9-to-5 job to open fake accounts,” said Pointner. “It’s organised. It’s very professional.”

Pointner meanwhile pointed to cross-operator data sharing as one of the most underutilised tools in the industry’s response, citing the International Betting Integrity Association as a model. 

Shared signals about fraudulent documents or suspicious identity behaviour, like opening five bank accounts in a single day, allow the industry to respond at a scale that no single operator can match alone. “That just helps us,” he said, “and that’s only possible when you put together the information from different operators.”

The Long Game

The only guarantee that every nation, fan and operator following the World Cup has is that it will end. What operators do with the customers it brings them is the real opportunity. 

For Smith, the post-tournament window is where identity strategy pays its longest dividend. This was echoed by Papanastasiou who argued that identity intelligence isn’t simply a cost of doing business during a major event, but when deployed correctly, it’s the mechanism that makes the event worth having.

Watch the full webinar here at SBC Webinars.