Latin America after Brazil: where operators look next

Latin America has become the industry’s most closely watched growth region, and for good reason. Brazil’s regulated online market opened at the start of 2025 and delivered a first-year result that reset expectations for the whole continent. But Brazil is not the region’s only story — and for operators planning the next phase of expansion, the more interesting questions are increasingly about the markets around it.

The Brazil benchmark

Brazil’s launch set the scale. In its first regulated year the market generated roughly BRL 37bn (around $7bn) in gross gaming revenue, drew about 25.2 million active bettors, and licensed dozens of operators across well over a hundred brands. It also delivered a substantial tax take and licence-fee income to the treasury. Those numbers made Brazil the largest regulated market in the region overnight and confirmed the thesis that had drawn every major operator to the country.

But Brazil also came with hard lessons: a steep licence fee, a demanding compliance and payments environment built around the local instant-payment system, and intense competition that compressed margins from day one. For operators, the takeaway was that a large regulated Latin American market is a prize worth having, but not an easy one.

Colombia: the established template

The region’s most mature regulated market predates the Brazil frenzy. Colombia was among the first Latin American countries to license online gambling under a national framework, and it has served as the template others study: a functioning regulator, a licensing regime operators understand, and a market that has proven online gambling can be regulated and taxed sustainably in the region.

For operators, Colombia’s appeal is its predictability. It lacks Brazil’s sheer size, but it offers a settled rule set and an established player base — the kind of market where the question is how to compete well rather than how to enter at all. It remains a proof point that Latin American regulation can work over the long term, not just at launch.

Peru and the next wave

Peru represents the next tier: a market that has moved to a formal licensing regime, bringing previously grey-market activity under regulation and offering operators a clearer legal footing. The pattern echoes Colombia and Brazil — a government formalising a market that already existed in practice, capturing tax revenue and imposing consumer-protection standards in exchange for legal certainty.

The broader Andean and Southern Cone region is following variations of the same path at different speeds. Each market brings its own licence structure, tax rate and payments landscape, which is why operators increasingly treat Latin America not as a single opportunity but as a sequence of distinct market entries, each requiring its own compliance, payments and local-partnership work.

What it means for suppliers

The regional expansion is a demand engine for the supplier stack. Each new regulated market needs localised payments — often built around domestic instant-payment rails — plus KYC and geolocation tooling tuned to local identity systems, and platform providers able to certify into a new jurisdiction quickly. Operators that already run in Brazil or Colombia have a head start on the compliance and payments groundwork, but every new market resets some of that work.

The strategic picture is clear. Brazil proved the scale of the Latin American opportunity; Colombia proved its durability; Peru and the markets behind it will decide how broad the regulated map becomes. For operators, the region has shifted from a single bet on one country to a multi-market programme — and the winners will be those that can enter each new jurisdiction efficiently rather than expensively. The changing regulatory status across the region is followed in our regulatory tracker.

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