What South Africa’s online betting patterns demand from the technology behind it
By Mariia Halaida, Head of Business Development at SOFTSWISS
Almost 85% of experienced Brazilian punters bet almost exclusively in frequent, small-stake, live in-play wagers. South African bettors move the other way: fewer bets, higher stakes, and spaced further apart. That difference in behaviour is the starting point for joint research from SOFTSWISS’s Alexander Kamenetskyi and OddsMarket’s Sergii Mykhailenko. The insight boils down to showing how important a deep understanding of player behaviour is for building appropriate product settings, risk controls, and fraud technology that actually work.
What that pattern requires from the technology behind it
The difference in player behaviour reaches almost every layer an operator controls: how deposit and withdrawal limits are calibrated, how identity checks are timed, and where an automated system draws the line between a legitimate large stake and a suspicious one. Import the settings built for a high-frequency market like Brazil’s, and a system tuned to catch a flood of small transactions ends up watching for the wrong thing in South Africa, which can have consequences for commercial success as well as the greater industry’s performance.
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The clearest evidence of this sits in fraud prevention and KYC. South Africa’s operators have built fraud-prevention and KYC systems around registration-time identity checks and deposit and withdrawal monitoring calibrated to size rather than frequency, matching a bettor who stakes considered amounts less often. Brazil’s faster growing market is building infrastructure around the opposite baseline: high-frequency, high-volume live wagering, where the anomaly worth flagging generally looks very different to South Africa’s. The same principle then also extends to product design and operational processes. A deposit limit or a verification trigger calibrated for one market’s rhythm won’t necessarily harmonise well somewhere else.
Meeting the regulatory standard, tuned to South Africa
South Africa’s National Gambling Board launched a Verified Gambling Operators portal in April, pulling licensing data from nine provincial authorities into one place so a bettor can confirm an operator holds a valid licence before depositing, a useful step, given how much of the industry’s credibility problem in South Africa comes from operators trading without one. A licence confirms an operator meets that standard, but it doesn’t determine how well their systems apply it to South African bettors specifically. Two operators can hold identical licences and run very different systems behind them: one relying on slow, manual identity checks, another on automated monitoring built around how South Africans actually bet and behave. That difference is what determines whether the local pattern gets read correctly.
South Africa’s gambling turnover reached R1,5 trillion in the 2024/25 financial year, up 31,3% on the year before. Growth at that scale doesn’t change the underlying pattern, though: South African bettors are still placing fewer, larger bets, not shifting towards the frequent, small-stake play driving volume in faster-growing emerging markets. What it does is raise the cost of getting the local settings wrong. An operator running Brazil’s playbook in South Africa, or South Africa’s in Brazil, ends up running product, risk and compliance systems tuned to a bettor who doesn’t generally exist in that market. Localisation, done properly, means every one of those systems, product, risk and compliance, is built around how the local bettor actually behaves. That takes technology flexible enough to be reconfigured market by market, and a provider that has done it before.
About the author
Mariia Halaida is Head of Business Development at SOFTSWISS, a global technology provider supplying software solutions for the iGaming industry, with a focus on platform stability, fraud-prevention infrastructure and responsible gaming innovation.
About SOFTSWISS
SOFTSWISSÂ is a global tech company, supplying award-winning software solutions for iGaming since 2009. Supported by a team of more than 2 000 experts, SOFTSWISS serves more than 1 000 global brands through its comprehensive product ecosystem. In 2013, it revolutionised the industry by introducing the world’s first Bitcoin-optimised online casino solution. In South Africa, SOFTSWISS acquired local sports betting technology provider Turfsport in 2024. Today, SOFTSWISS continues to champion responsible gaming across the globe from its offices in Malta, Poland and Georgia.
