Entering a new regulated market comes with a lot of paperwork.

Long before licence applications are actually submitted, the business needs to make sure it has its tech in order to comply with local regulations. Then there are governance structures, testing certifications and a whole lot more ducks to be lined up in a row before a business can even think about going live in a new territory.

With this in mind, it can be easy to overlook the hiring challenges that market entry presents.

It’s not just about adding headcount to your teams. Some really careful consideration needs to go into acquiring the right talent to position you for success in a challenging new environment.

Hire local?

Your initial instinct will likely be to shop locally. Expertise from personnel that are already on the ground can be an enormous help.

The feedback loop of bringing in staff that are already based in the jurisdiction you are launching in, and who don’t need to relocate, is also very beneficial.

Teams can learn many valuable lessons from those who have already walked these paths, helping you avoid the pitfalls many earlier entrants faced.

The challenge here is that these sorts of hires are often prohibitively expensive.

Savvy professionals understand the value of their talent, particularly in high competition sectors like compliance.

It’s unlikely that budgets will stretch to parachuting in an entirely new team of experienced experts in your new jurisdiction.

State of regulation

The above is only imagining that the market you are entering is already established. If you are instead targeting an area going through a re-regulation process then the calculus is far more complex.

Potentially exciting new opportunities of this kind on the horizon include Finland in the short term and Canada’s Quebec in the medium term.

Neither of these markets has established igaming talent pools to draw from, so experience is thin on the ground and highly sought after.

There are simply not enough market veterans to fill the teams of every potential entrant. Take Finland for example, where 79 licence applications had been lodged by late October ahead of launch next July.

To date, the only companies with experience operating under Finnish regulations are Veikkaus and Paf, both of whom will remain as major players and, as such, are motivated to retain as many of their staff as possible.

This is a typical story when it comes to staffing up in new markets.

Even if you’re entering somewhere that you, or commercial rivals, were acting in a grey market capacity, it’s not as simple as carrying over a team or raiding that segment for new staff.

Compliance, unquestionably the largest single unique challenge facing new market entry, is the one area where grey-market experience offers nothing.

Outsourcing

It’s hard to get around the fact that some level of consultancy work will be needed along the process of getting a new market proposition up and running in a highly regulated environment.

Often this will take the form of legal support, particularly when it comes to writing licence applications that may need to be done in the local language.

In areas like payments there may also be peculiarities in a particular jurisdiction that simply need on-the-ground expertise to manage.

Managing the upfront costs in this area is important, but more critical is long term planning for how you will move as much of this knowledge in-house as possible.

That may mean brokering deals to embed those outside contractors in your business as much as possible or making strategic hires from specialist companies who can educate your existing teams.

Leadership

With this level of complexity and the significant challenges around relevant background, the value of good leadership skyrockets.

A steady hand on the tiller is essential during turbulent times and no matter how well prepared your organisation is, there will be unexpected challenges and difficult decisions to navigate in a new regulated market.

Your business may already be equipped with this kind of skillset, but are your existing executives stretched too thin? Or are there particular abilities that they lack which will prove to be essential in your new market of choice?

Assessing this from the inside is very difficult, bordering on impossible. It takes an outside eye with knowledge gleaned from thousands of similar companies and the ability to view things in their context.

That’s where Pentasia can lend a helping hand. Starting with our Talent Acquisition Audit, we can identify where your staffing function is lacking in its ability to make effective, long-lasting hires.

Pentasia Edge looks at the broader health of the company to assess where gaps need to be filled in order to succeed in a new regulated market. Its data-driven assessment, backed by decades of relationship-building, provides you with all the intelligence you need to act effectively.