Ten months before Finland's market opens, a great deal about it is settled. The dates are in law. The tax rate is in law. The licence types, the fees and the division between competitive and exclusive verticals are all established.
What follows is the other list: the things that are not yet knowable, why each one is open, and roughly when an answer should appear. We publish it because the gap between what is settled and what is assumed is where entry plans go wrong, and because most coverage of this market does not distinguish between the two.
1. Who else is applying
Around fifty applications are with the National Police Board. Four applicants are identifiable from public sources. The remaining forty-six are not, because the regulator does not publish applicant names and has no obligation to.
When it resolves: partially and gradually. Listed operators disclose at results. Suppliers disclose when they announce client wins, which is currently the most productive channel. A full picture will not exist before licences are granted, and possibly not then.
2. What the supervision fee actually costs at the top tier
Published sources give €434,000, €400,000 and €265,000 for the highest revenue band. We cannot reconcile them. For an operator modelling Finnish economics this is a material difference, and it is currently unresolvable from secondary sources.
When it resolves: it may already be resolved in the gazetted regulation. Anyone who needs the number should read the regulation rather than any summary, ours included.
3. Exactly what the marketing rules permit
The Ministry of the Interior says marketing is permitted subject to restrictions in the Act. Legal commentary describes prohibitions on affiliate marketing, influencer promotion and telemarketing, and a five-times cap on bonus wagering. These are consistently reported but they are not the authority's own words, and no enforcement practice exists because the provisions are not in force.
When it resolves: the text is knowable now from the Act itself. How it is enforced will not be knowable until the Supervisory Agency has been operating for some months, which means late 2027 at the earliest.
4. What the software licence requires
The obligation is dated and certain: applications open 1 July 2027, and from 1 July 2028 operators may only use licensed software. The requirements to obtain one have not been published, because the process does not exist yet.
Suppliers are therefore being asked by operator clients to guarantee something whose conditions nobody has seen. The reasonable assumption is that it mirrors the operator process. It is an assumption.
When it resolves: July 2027, or shortly before if the Agency publishes guidance in advance.
5. How long the integration queue will be
Before an operator can trade it must complete independent system verification and an integration project with the regulator's supervision system. Dozens of operators will be doing this simultaneously with one resource-constrained authority, in the same window.
No published information exists on the Agency's capacity for this, how long a typical integration takes, or what happens to an operator whose licence is granted but whose integration is not finished by 1 July 2027.
When it resolves: in practice, during the first half of 2027, when the first operators go through it. That is late for anyone planning a day-one launch.
6. What happens to Veikkaus
The incumbent has split into two subsidiaries, applied for licences on both sides of the new system, agreed to pay around €1 billion for its remaining exclusivity, and restructured toward commercial functions. A former senior executive has valued the business at up to €4.5 billion and said private firms have expressed acquisition interest.
Whether any part of it is sold is a political question with no timetable attached.
When it resolves: unknowable. It is a decision, not a process.
Why we publish this
A tracker with four records and a guide that labels half its statements as reported can look like a thin product next to sites that publish twenty likely applicants and state every rule as settled fact.
The difference is that this list exists. If you are deciding whether to spend €29,000 on an application, restructure an acquisition model around an affiliate prohibition, or commit to a platform that cannot yet be licensed, the useful thing is not more confident-sounding information. It is an accurate account of which parts of the picture are solid and which are not.
We will update this list as items resolve, and log the changes.
