Software engineered in Stoke-on-Trent and Manchester has secured another five years in one of Europe’s most tightly regulated digital markets. For the North’s tech scene, the renewal says something about what the region now exports: platforms built to pass an inspection in a country their developers may never visit.
A northern engineering base
The software belongs to bet365, founded in 2000 in North Staffordshire. By 2023 it employed more than 6,000 people and operated in 21 languages, figures the company gave when its technology arm, Hillside Technology, set up a Platform Innovation Hub to test new tools against the core platform.
Manchester came first, in 2016. The firm opened its first satellite technology office in Spring Gardens, hiring 50 to 70 people to support the development teams in Stoke-on-Trent. Dom Hawley, then head of software development, said at the time that bet365 had found exceptional people in Stoke but now had to recruit outside the local area to keep growing. BusinessCloud covered the move into Manchester when it was announced. A year later the Spring Gardens office was set to grow from 60 to more than 150 staff, with developers in both cities building the HTML5 desktop site together.
Testing followed. In late 2022 Hillside brought its software testing academy to Manchester, hiring up to 10 testers on aptitude rather than CV and training them toward the ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level. In a regulated product, testing carries more weight than usual. Every market the platform enters adds a rule set, and somebody has to prove the software obeys it.
A licence that has to be earned twice
On 17 September the Kansspelautoriteit (KSA), the Netherlands’ regulator for games of chance, announced its first eight follow-up licences. One went to Hillside (New Media Malta) Plc, the bet365 company that holds the Dutch permit. The original licences date from 2021, when the Dutch market opened, and expired at the end of September 2026. The renewals run from October 2026 to September 2031.
It was no rubber stamp. The KSA says this round was the first where it looked explicitly at violations confirmed over the previous five years. Applicants had to explain what they had done to fix them and how they would stop them happening again, and the regulator handed some of them extra points for attention without naming which. A platform built in Stoke does not carry its British approval abroad. It re-qualifies country by country, against each regulator’s rules and, in the Dutch case, against its own record.
Repeat that across every jurisdiction and the result is a set of separate licensed pools, each defined by one regulator’s register and most of them far smaller than Britain’s. Because each pool has a hard edge, the gap can be counted.
The count in Casino.net’s online casino reviews across 17 markets shows how steep it is: 103 reviews of UKGC-licensed operators, against 13 for Malta’s MGA, 11 for Germany’s GGL, 10 for Spain’s DGOJ and 9 for AGCO-registered operators in Ontario. The Netherlands, where bet365 has just renewed, still sits at “final checks” there, one of nine markets in progress.
Compliance as the product
For engineers in Stoke and Manchester, those numbers describe the job. A UK build serves a crowded market under one rulebook. A Dutch, German or Ontario build serves a much thinner field under a different one, with its own limits and its own data feeds to the regulator. The Dutch renewal included a fresh integration test of the link to the KSA’s control database. None of it is visible to a customer, and all of it has to work on day one. It also has to keep working when the rules change mid-licence, which in the Netherlands they did on 1 January 2026, when the KSA added new requirements, among them an exit plan, ahead of this renewal round.
It is also expensive. bet365’s latest accounts showed pre-tax profit falling from £596 million to £339 million, with the cost of expanding into new overseas markets named as a key reason. Direct costs rose from £696.8 million to £895.5 million over the same period. That is what per-market builds look like on a balance sheet.
The pressure to keep doing it is not going away. With stake limits, a statutory levy and higher duty at home, UK operators have been leaning harder on growth abroad. Each new country means another build that a team in the North has to get past an inspector it has never met.
The next exam is already scheduled
The Dutch permit now runs to September 2031. Whatever the KSA asks for next time, the answer will come from five years of logs and test records that are being written in Stoke and Manchester now. Testers who came through the academy since 2022 will have spent most of their careers on that kind of evidence. The North is exporting a sportsbook, and alongside it a habit of proving, line by line and in a foreign regulator’s language, that the sportsbook does what it says.