Finland’s National Police Board has cleared ComeOn Group and newcomer SuomiVeto to operate in the country’s new competitive gambling market, taking the number of publicly confirmed licensees to four ahead of the sector’s opening to competition on 1 July 2027. The approvals mark a further step in the dismantling of Veikkaus’s long-standing state monopoly, one of the last of its kind in the European Union.
Neither ComeOn nor SuomiVeto can accept a bet or a casino stake in Finland until the licensed regime goes live. The Finland licensing process has been running since the application window opened on 2 March 2026, and the pair now join Wildz Group and Hippos ATG as the first operators to go public with approvals.
What happened
ComeOn Group and newcomer SuomiVeto have both confirmed that they hold Finnish gambling licences, taking the number of operators publicly cleared for the country’s new competitive online market to four.
Neither brand can take a bet or a casino stake in Finland yet, as the licensed regime only goes live on 1 July 2027, when Veikkaus loses its exclusive grip on online casino and sports betting.
The pair join Hippos ATG and Wildz Group, which became the first company to go public with an approval earlier this month, with the latest tally of four confirmed licensees compiled by Gaming Intelligence.
ComeOn’s owner, Swedish group European Entertainment Group (EEG), confirmed in a statement dated 22 October that
the Finnish National Police Board had granted all of the licences the subsidiary sought, covering both online casino and sports betting.
ComeOn filed its applications on 2 March 2026, the day the application window opened, positioning itself as one of the first operators to receive approval under Finland’s new Gambling Act.
EEG chief executive Itai Frieberger described the outcome as an important milestone for the group’s regulated market strategy, while chief financial officer Raffaele Amodio said
“Finland is a core part of our growth strategy.”
SuomiVeto, meanwhile, is
led by the successful founders of BetCity in the Netherlands
, who previously built that Dutch brand before its sale to Entain. SuomiVeto co-founder Melvin Bostelaar said the licence represents the start of a new chapter for the Helsinki-based operator.
Why it matters
Finland’s shift to a multi-licence model ends one of Europe’s last fully state-controlled online gambling regimes, opening a market with one of the highest per-capita gambling rates in the world to private operators for the first time. The staggered pace of licence confirmations, now standing at four with reports of roughly 80 applications submitted overall, gives a preview of which groups are moving fastest to secure first-mover positioning before the July 2027 launch.
For suppliers and platform providers, each new confirmed licensee signals fresh commercial activity. SuomiVeto has already lined up turnkey technology partnerships with Bragg Gaming and Kambi to support its Finnish launch, underlining how licensing decisions cascade into supplier contracts well before a market formally opens.
For affiliates and performance marketers, the build-up to Finland’s opening represents a rare opportunity: a developed Nordic market with strong digital engagement and no established competitive SEO or affiliate presence, since all online activity has until now run through the Veikkaus monopoly. Early positioning around Finnish-language content and licensed-operator comparisons is likely to carry outsized value once marketing restrictions and bonus rules under the new Gambling Act come into force.
The bigger picture
Finland’s reform follows a now-familiar European pattern of monopoly markets transitioning to licensed competition, mirroring earlier liberalisations in the Netherlands and elsewhere. The National Police Board will hand supervisory responsibility to a newly created Finnish Supervisory Authority once the market opens, with Veikkaus retaining only lottery, scratch card and physical slot machine exclusivity.
With four operators now confirmed and reports suggesting dozens more applications in the pipeline, competition for Finnish market share is shaping up well before the formal launch date. That mirrors the pattern seen in other recently reformed European markets, where early licence announcements have tended to cluster around operators with existing Nordic or Dutch regulatory experience, such as SuomiVeto’s BetCity pedigree and ComeOn’s established Scandinavian footprint.
Readers interested in how European regulators are tightening deposit and player-protection rules in parallel with market openings can see our coverage of Spain’s new cross-operator deposit cap, which reflects a similar regulatory direction across the continent.
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