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About Jewel Aztec
Two blockbuster developments in the casino space earlier this year seemed to indicate an increasingly bullish bet on the sector, including Fertitta Entertainment’s acquisition of Caesars Entertainment in May. The other is a subsequent takeover offer of MGM Resorts from its largest shareholder, Barry Diller’s People Inc. But a negative shift in market conditions could affect both deals.
In July, Fertitta’s General Counsel Steven Scheinthal told the Nevada Gaming Control Board that the company had a letter of intent from banks to finance the transaction but was waiting for better borrowing conditions. Fertitta is assuming nearly $12 billion in Caesars’ debt and is committed to a $6.6 billion financing package.
“Our hope is that in the next few months there will be a window of opportunity where the market will be hotter and [it’s] a more interest rate friendly environment where we can go raise the money and then just put it in an escrow account,” Scheinthal said at the time.
What is Jewel Aztec?
As Spain celebrated the successful end of their campaign, Kambi was reflecting on a significant achievement of its own. For the sports betting technology provider, the tournament represented a major technological milestone: its first World Cup traded entirely by AI.
Across 104 matches and more than 100 million bets, AI handled every stage of the pricing lifecycle – from ingesting data and creating the offering to managing liabilities and settling bets. The platform recorded zero downtime, delivered an operator trading margin of 18% and, during the final alone, processed more than one million unique bet combinations.
Kambi had set itself the ambitious target of delivering the entire tournament through AI. By the time Spain lifted the trophy, it had provided compelling evidence that automated trading could withstand the scale and intensity of sport’s biggest betting event while improving the experience offered to operators and their customers.
About Jewel Aztec
Enforcement publicity may lack context, and some settlements may involve errors rather than systemic recklessness. But the sector cannot control how its opponents use these cases. It can only reduce the supply.
At a moment when the industry needs to persuade politicians that regulated gambling is capable of managing risk responsibly, repeated failures in long-established areas such as AML and safer gambling amount to political self-harm.
The Commission may sometimes load the gun, but operators keep providing the ammunition.
