Hippos ATG Lands Finnish Licence and Pledges 60% to Racing

A Swedish racing operator and Finland’s national horse racing association have cleared the hurdle that mattered most to them. Hippos ATG has confirmed a five-year licence to operate in Finland, becoming the second company to publicly announce approval ahead of the regulated market opening on 1 July 2027. The venture plans to offer horse racing betting, sports wagering and online casino games, and it arrives carrying an unusual commitment about where the profits end up.

A Joint Venture Built for a Single Market

ATG and Suomen Hippos set up Hippos ATG as an equally owned company in 2025 with one purpose, which was to secure a Finnish licence and start trading on the opening day of the new system. AB Trav och Galopp runs horse racing betting in Sweden and already operates in Denmark, so the group brings regulated Nordic experience to the partnership. Suomen Hippos covers the domestic side as the association governing Finnish trotting and horse breeding.

The company will trade under the ATG brand and run on the Swedish operator’s existing gaming platform. It framed that choice from the beginning as the cost-efficient route into a market where nobody yet knows how the economics will settle. Building a new platform for a country of 5.6 million people makes far less sense than extending one that already handles Swedish and Danish traffic.

CEO Mikael Bäcke said his team built the business and its operating models from scratch to meet the demands of the new Finnish legislation, and he called a positive decision the single most important condition for entering the market. Attention now moves to finishing the products themselves. The Hippos ATG licence runs for five years, which gives the venture a decent runway to prove the model works.

Sixty Percent of Profits Go Back to Horse Racing

The profit arrangement separates this operator from most of the names queuing for Finnish approval. Sixty percent of profits will flow back into Finnish equestrian sport and horse breeding, reflecting Suomen Hippos’s half of the business. Bäcke has put the long-term goal plainly, pointing to lasting economic value for the Finnish horse industry.

That structure gives the Hippos ATG licence a political dimension no standard commercial application carries. Finnish trotting has leaned on betting revenue for decades, and the end of the Veikkaus monopoly threatened to break the connection. A licensed operator with the national racing body as co-owner keeps money moving toward the stables, and it does so inside the new regulated framework rather than around it.

What the Hippos ATG Licence Announcement Leaves Open

One detail deserves attention here. Finland’s National Police Board, which handles applications until the new supervisory authority takes over, has not published any list of successful applicants. Both confirmations so far have come from the companies themselves, with Wildz Group announcing its approval on 15 October and Hippos ATG following five days later.

So the Hippos ATG licence currently rests on the company’s own statement rather than on a regulator’s public record. Around 80 applications now sit with the police board, up from roughly 75 in September, and nobody outside those companies can measure how far the process has actually moved. Operators have every reason to announce early, because a confirmed approval reassures partners, suppliers and anyone weighing a commercial deal before July.

A Smaller Market Than the Application Numbers Suggest

Finland’s gambling market was worth roughly €2 billion in 2017 on industry estimates, and it had dropped to around €1.5 billion by 2023. Eighty applications chasing a shrinking pot raises an obvious question about how many brands the country can realistically carry. Sweden, with twice the population, counts 89 licences.

The reform aims to pull offshore play back under domestic supervision, and Finland has a substantial grey market to recapture. Veikkaus keeps the national lottery and will compete for everything else, starting with a customer list no new entrant can match. The Hippos ATG licence opens a legal route in, but it does nothing about the head start the state operator brings to day one.

The Affiliate Ban Troubles the New Arrivals

Antti Koivula, chief compliance officer at Hippos ATG, has criticised Finland’s ban on affiliate marketing in public. He said at the SBC Summit in Lisbon in September that the marketing regulation and its enforcement still worry him, and he called the removal of traditional acquisition channels a genuinely bad option for the market. Many affiliates, he argued, work responsibly and do meaningful player protection work of their own.

His concern is practical rather than philosophical, and it lands on his own company first, because the Hippos ATG licence arrives with no Finnish customer list attached to it. A newly licensed brand without an existing Finnish customer base needs somewhere to find players, and the rules close one of the most effective routes while leaving television, radio and print open. Offshore sites already serving Finnish customers face no such limit, so the restriction risks shielding the activity the reform set out to reduce.

Eight Months to Opening Day

Hippos ATG now has roughly eight months to finish its products and complete its operating entity before a Finnish customer can legally place a bet with it. The Hippos ATG licence settles the regulatory question, though the commercial ones stay wide open, from acquisition costs under restricted marketing to how much of the offshore audience actually migrates. The venture at least knows exactly what it is building toward, which is more than most of the 80 applicants can say this week. Finnish racing will watch the outcome closely, because 60 percent of whatever this company earns belongs to its stables.