Hippos ATG Oy, the joint venture between Sweden's ATG and Suomen Hippos, is the second company to announce a Finnish gambling licence. The decision is dated 19 October 2026.

Its chief compliance officer published the decision document itself. That makes this the first time the actual paperwork has been visible, and the paperwork says more than the announcement does.

What the decision document shows

  • Licence holder: Hippos ATG Oy, business ID 3540828-4
  • Licence number: RALU/2027/L108
  • Validity: 1 July 2027 to 30 June 2032, the whole of Finland excluding Åland
  • Application received by the National Police Board: 2 March 2026
  • Decision: 19 October 2026
  • Case reference: POL-2026-31121, document ID-26766721

The application arrived on the second day the window was open.

Seven months and seventeen days

That is the elapsed time from filing to decision, for an application submitted on day two.

The Board's published processing target is three to six months. One senior inspector repeated that figure to Iltalehti in September; another gave six to eight months to Yle in the same week. The first documented case took longer than both.

We said in our analysis of the queue that the published target had not yet been demonstrated. It now has a measured counter-example, and it is the best possible case: an early filer, a substantial applicant, a purpose-built Finnish company with named compliance leadership.

Anyone whose application arrived in September should take seven and a half months as a floor rather than a target. That lands in late April 2027 at the earliest, nine weeks before the market opens.

The licence number is the interesting part

RALU/2027/L108.

We do not know what the 108 counts. It could be a sequential licence number, in which case rather more decisions exist than the two that have been announced. It could equally be a document register convention that has nothing to do with how many licences have been issued.

We are not going to guess, and we would caution against anyone else doing so.

What it does establish is that a numbering scheme exists. The National Police Board does not publish licence outcomes and has given no indication that it will. But every licensee receives a numbered decision, and licensees have an incentive to publish them.

So the register the regulator will not publish can be reconstructed from the outside. We are going to record the licence number of every decision we can verify, alongside the filing and decision dates. With enough of them, the sequence becomes readable, and so does the throughput.

If you hold a Finnish licence decision and are willing to share the number and dates, we would like to hear from you. We will record the source and the confidence tier as we do with everything else.

What Hippos ATG actually got

The licence covers horse betting, sports betting and online casino. The company intends to be live on day one, 1 July 2027.

Chief executive Mikael Bäcke made a point worth repeating for anyone still drafting: applying is not filling in a form. He listed responsible gambling processes, anti-money laundering, information security, technical regulatory compliance, internal control, risk management and corporate governance.

That matches what we found in the Board's own application guidance, where the marketing statement alone is used to plan supervision and audits.

The venture will trade under the ATG brand, chosen for recognition. Its revenue is split 60-40 between Suomen Hippos and ATG, and ATG's technology stack powers it.

Two licences, two very different companies

Wildz Group is Malta-based with an existing Finnish-facing brand in Tuplaus. Hippos ATG is a Finnish company built for this market, with three permanent staff as of mid-2026 and a compliance officer appointed before the application.

One converted an existing position into a lawful one. The other constructed a compliant company from nothing and filed on day two.

Both worked. On the evidence so far, the Board is not favouring either model.

What we do not know

  • How many licences have been granted in total. Two have been announced.
  • What the number in RALU/2027/L108 denotes.
  • Whether any application has been refused.
  • Whether the Board will publish a register before July 2027.

Our Licence Tracker now records both licensees, with licence numbers and dates where we have them.