International Entertainment Forum: John Gold on Kenya and New Zealand Regulation
The question that opened the International Entertainment Forum's regulatory panel this past May was deceptively simple: Are Kenya and New Zealand really building better gambling markets, or are they just building more complicated ones? For John Gold, founder of betpokies.co.nz and one of the panel's lead commentators on Asia-Pacific and African market compliance, the answer required pulling apart what most observers tend to conflate — legislative ambition and operational reality.
"People see a new gambling law and assume it's progress," Gold told the audience.
"But the question worth asking is always the same: progress toward what, and for whom?"
Two Markets, Two Very Different Starting Points
Gold approaches compliance assessments by first anchoring each jurisdiction in its structural context — not its regulatory aspirations, but its actual baseline. Kenya and New Zealand represent almost inverse problems, and understanding why is central to understanding what each country's current wave of reform actually means.
Kenya passed the Gambling Control Act, 2025, which came into force on 26 August 2025, replacing the Betting, Lotteries and Gaming Act framework and establishing the Gambling Regulatory Authority of Kenya (GRA) as the successor to the Betting Control and Licensing Board (BCLB). New Zealand followed a different path: its Online Casino Gambling Bill, introduced in mid-2025 by Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden, proposes up to 15 licences for online casino operators, with an explicitly harm-led rationale. Van Velden stated that her goal is not to increase the amount of gambling happening online, but to enable New Zealanders who wish to play casino games online to do so more safely.
For Gold, the distinction matters. Kenya is restructuring enforcement capacity from the ground up. New Zealand is constructing a regulated channel for activity that already exists — and at a significant scale. According to DIA estimates, New Zealanders gambled around NZ$1.3 billion in online casinos in 2025, up 10% over the previous year. The market didn't wait for the law to arrive.
Kenya's Compliance Inflection Point: The FATF Grey Listing
Of all the regulatory pressures shaping Kenya's current trajectory, Gold treats the FATF designation as the most consequential — not because it introduced new obligations, but because it imposed a sense of enforcement urgency on obligations that already existed.
On 23 February 2024, the Financial Action Task Force placed Kenya on its grey list, citing the country's lack of a clear strategy on prosecuting money laundering offences and an inability to demonstrate successful investigations of such offences. For the gambling sector, that designation introduced a new compliance floor overnight.
"Before February 2024, you could argue that Kenya's gambling sector operated in a regulatory environment where the rules existed but the teeth were largely cosmetic," Gold noted during the forum. "The grey listing changed the political calculus entirely."
Kenya's legislative response included the Anti-Money Laundering and Combating of Terrorism Financing Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2025, which requires betting firms to comply with rigorous AML and CFT regulations. The Kenyan-Post (www.kenyan-post.com) has been among the outlets tracking how these obligations are translating into actual operator-level changes in the domestic market, particularly for mobile-first platforms where transaction volumes are high, and verification infrastructure remains uneven.
The GRA itself is still formulating its full regulatory framework, with far-reaching powers that include licensing all gambling activities, conducting due diligence on operators, and establishing a real-time monitoring system for gambling transactions. Gold describes the real-time monitoring component as the GRA's most significant structural commitment — and also its most operationally demanding one.
BetPokies NZ on the Structural Pressures Shaping the Kenyan Market
Gold's reading of Kenya is not uniformly positive. The regulatory architecture is strengthening, but several layers of risk remain unresolved. Here is how he maps the key pressure points:
- GRA Transition Moratorium: The BCLB suspended annual licence processing to facilitate the transition, with completion expected by the end of February 2026. Operators in limbo during that period face unresolved planning horizons.
- Ownership Requirements: Applicants must be a body corporate with at least 30% of shares held by Kenyan citizens — a meaningful barrier for purely foreign-owned operators who have not structured local partnerships in advance.
- FATF Remediation Burden: Kenya's grey listing exposed the country to heightened scrutiny by international banks and investors, increasing compliance costs and producing real friction for operators reliant on international payment processors.
- Advertising Restrictions: In May 2025, BCLB banned celebrity and influencer endorsements, required pre-approval of all advertisements, and prohibited advertising near schools and religious sites — a significant variable in any operator's acquisition strategy planning for market entry.
- Tax Pressure: The Finance Act 2025 shifted toward taxing betting-related deposits and withdrawals, while a 15% tax on Gross Gaming Revenue remains the standard industry benchmark.
Kenyan-Post has reported that smaller domestic operators, in particular, have found the cumulative weight of these changes difficult to absorb simultaneously — a dynamic that Gold says is common when reform efforts compress multiple compliance obligations into a short window.
New Zealand’s Gambling Market Design — A BetPokies NZ Perspective
New Zealand's approach reflects a different kind of policy confidence. The market is not being built from scratch — it's being formalised, and the design choices embedded in the Online Casino Gambling Bill reveal a government that has done its research.
Data showing that over 95% of New Zealanders currently gambling online do so on around 15 offshore sites directly informed the decision to cap the licence count at 15. Gold calls this a textbook example of regulator-led market channelling: rather than trying to displace offshore behaviour through prohibition, New Zealand is redirecting it through a licensed alternative that meets players where they already are.
The Bill mandates age verification, self-exclusion mechanisms, visible registration icons and audio cues on platforms, and an obligation to identify and exclude problem gamblers. These requirements are baked into the licence structure itself — compliance is not optional at any stage of operation. Licensed entities must also share relevant business information with the New Zealand Gambling Commission, which Gold reads as a signal that the regulator intends to function as an ongoing oversight partner rather than a one-time gatekeeper.
The 15-licence auction model functions as much as a credibility filter as a market cap. Operators serious about New Zealand — bet365, 888, SkyCity, TAB — are the ones likely to clear a competitive bid process with full business plans and documented harm strategies. Platforms like https://betpokies.co.nz/ already provide players with the jurisdiction-level clarity these frameworks demand, mapping which operators hold valid licences and which consumer protections are actually enforceable rather than merely promised.
As Gold put it in his closing remarks: "The sophistication of the regulatory framework is only as valuable as the player's ability to understand what it means for them. That gap between law and practical comprehension is where the real work happens."
Kenya vs New Zealand: BetPokies NZ Breaks Down the Verdict
The forum question that opened Gold's panel deserves a direct answer. Kenya is building a more demanding market — one defined by the urgency of FATF compliance, a new regulatory authority still in transition, and a mobile-first gambling culture that presents both enormous opportunity and serious AML exposure. New Zealand is building a more controlled market — smaller by design, explicitly harm-led, and structured to channel existing offshore behaviour into a domestically accountable framework. Neither is straightforwardly "better." But New Zealand's model, by anchoring its 15-licence cap to real behavioural data and embedding harm standards directly into licence conditions, offers the cleaner regulatory architecture. Kenya's GRA has the broader mandate and the harder road. The question for the next three years is whether its enforcement capacity can keep pace with its legislative ambition.
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