The necessity of building and maintaining a strong network is a familiar construct among numerous industries, and is certainly one that is not lost in the gaming community.

However, among the multitude of strategies and expert tutorials on how best to achieve such a goal, is the question of: how much do you know about your network? With this in mind, CasinoBeats is aiming to take a look under the hood, if you will, and has tasked the 100 Club to help out.

Terese Thagaard, the newly appointed Chief Legal Officer of PressEnter Group, recalls an unsettling time in trying to define a concrete career path, what was the result of an incident that is defined as more luck that judgement, an abbreviation overload and what happened when belief in ones own judgement led to a regulatory challenge.

Terese Thagaard, Chief Legal Officer of PressEnter Group

Could you begin by talking us through any past experiences that have been gained outside of the gambling industry? Could your career have taken any different paths?

I trained as a lawyer in private practice in London after finishing Law School. Once I qualified as an English solicitor in 2010, I continued in private practice and was involved in a wide range of contentious and non-contentious commercial matters, for domestic, international private and listed companies, and high net worth individuals across a broad range of industry sectors.

My career could have taken many different paths. I recall finding this unsettling at the time as it was not easy to work out early on whether I had made the right career choice. However, looking back at it now, I can see that I was fortunate to have been in a position where I had the opportunity to choose the direction in which to take my career and one that has led me to work for PressEnter Group. 

What was it that eventually led you into this industry?

It was more by luck than judgment! I was contacted out of the blue by a recruitment consultant regarding a Legal Counsel role at another gaming company. At that time, I had very limited knowledge of online gambling and no specific interest in it. 

However, having spent some time researching the industry, I felt that the opportunity to work in the industry was exciting, and I feel the same today, particularly with the opportunity PressEnter Group has given me. 

The challenges may differ over time, but the essence of it being fast paced, data driven, customer focused and challenging from a regulatory perspective, remains the same. 

How would you assess your progress through the industry to date? Are there any interesting anecdotes that would interest our readers, or any stand out experiences that may not have been possible without the current, or a past, role?

It is difficult to comment on one’s own progress within the industry. All I would say is that progress is something that is very individual and depends on one’s circumstances and to some extent being in the right place at the right time.

I have had many memorable experiences since joining the industry. Of course, there have been the occasional awkward award dinners to sit through, and initially it took me some time to get familiar with all the abbreviations such as GGR, NGR, RTP, NDC etc.

However, one experience that stands out is when I led another high profile gaming company to challenge the Swedish Gambling Authority’s interpretation of the temporary COVID-19 restrictions on deposits for online casino operators. We successfully appealed the decision that we were in breach of the restrictions by allowing a customer’s weekly deposit limit to determine to which games it had access. 

Advising the business to implement a different solution from others in the industry, and then to challenge the regulator requires conviction and belief in one’s analysis and judgement. I was fortunate to be able to call on my extensive litigation experience in private practice to make what turned out to be the right call.

What would you say have been the major changes during your time working in the industry? Both for the better and worse.

The increasing complexity of regulations with more focus on AML and consumer protection. The complexity makes it more difficult to navigate, and it is of course both costly and burdensome for operators.

However, it is difficult to view these changes overall as negative, and similar trends can be seen in other industries as well, as our society becomes more sophisticated and regulated.

PressEnter Group are taking all the right steps to ensure they have the right, and appropriate hires in place to steer themselves through the intricacy of such procedures. 

If you could ask the 100 Club any questions, or task them with tackling any issue, what would that be?

What do they regard as the biggest challenges and opportunities for their business over the next 3 to 5 years?