BetFair:

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Betfair Customer Services 19 Mar 18:27
Dear BetFair, I hope you will answer the following:

Under current UK regulations you are not required by law to inform your customer base of changes in advance, but under FSA regulations and European Law you would be. Given the strength with which you defended the GC&#8217-s consideration that exchanges should be FSA regulated when the Gambling Bill was first drafted, don&#8217-t you think it would have been wise or prudent to satisfy the most basic of FSA regulations too – and advise your customer base of material changes to the bet matching algorithm: the key component of the exchange software we all trade on, and one which matches wagers totalling billions of pounds in the UK today.

I am not sure you are correct here: what we were doing here is entirely in line with our licence and what we have always said we do. If you look at repeated statements made about what we are, I (this is Mark [Davies]) have always stated publicly on behalf of the company that the best definition of a betting exchange is a bookmaker which uses technology to manage its risk perfectly. This is what we were doing here: matching bets in a manner which meant that we, as an operator, had no exposure to the outcome of the event. People have always described Betfair as P2P and told me that our description of the company in these risk-based terms was spin. The reality is the opposite: Betfair is a many-to-many system where demand between customers is matched such that the operator of the exchange does not have risk to the outcome of the event. It is precisely on this basis that we have always been licensed as a bookmaker.

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Mark Davies

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