Steven Valentine, Comtrade Gaming: “We’ve always been a delivery-focused business rather than a sales-focused business”
Shows & conferences - 9 October, 2026
During SBC Summit Lisbon 2026, Focus Gaming News sat down with Steven Valentine, Chief Commercial Officer at Comtrade Gaming, to discuss the impact of the World Cup on operators, what drives clients to switch platforms, and the conversations dominating the show floor.
Valentine began by reflecting on the World Cup, which he described as “the biggest World Cup there’s ever been”. While results did not favour operators on the revenue side, he said the tournament proved “a great acquisition tool”. Scalability was on many operators' minds beforehand, but Valentine said it was never a concern for Comtrade, a platform company that can handle “thousands of bets per second”. All of its operators “sailed through it”, and for most of them the tournament month was “by far the biggest month of the year”.
Turning to what draws clients to Comtrade, Valentine explained that the operators it typically works with are experienced players who “know their operations” and “know their market”, but are unhappy with their current technology partner. They arrive looking for something “more scalable, more professional” that will help them grow. Their core need, a tool that lets them execute their business strategy, has not changed. However, with “margins getting squeezed by tax”, operators now expect vendors to bundle in services they once paid for separately, such as gamification tools and CRM. Comtrade builds all of this as proprietary software, shaped over 10 to 12 years by demanding, large-scale clients, with every new operator benefiting from that “constant pool of ideas for features and functionality”.
Valentine also addressed the migration horror stories that often put operators off moving. Many sit on platforms that leave them “mediocre-happy” but “almost too scared to move”. Contrasting Comtrade with sales-led rivals that over-promise, he said the company has “always been a delivery-focused business rather than a sales-focused business”, and claimed a “100 per cent success record on migrations”. He attributed this to a deliberately “much smaller customer base, but typically a higher-value one”, which allows Comtrade to give each client the attention it needs, whereas providers with hundreds of customers struggle to scale support profitably.
On the conversations at the event, Valentine said Brazil was “obviously the hottest topic” following the closure of that market. The question now, he noted, is “what do we do now?”, with many Brazilian operators looking to diversify across the rest of LatAm. He expects Brazil to stay shut for the foreseeable future: “Realistically, Brazil’s probably closed for the next six months.” He also questioned whether operators will trust the market again, particularly the smaller ones, and suggested Comtrade could help them diversify.
Looking beyond Brazil, Valentine pointed to opportunities in Europe, citing Finland opening next year and New Zealand set to open. As he put it, “things happen, and you move on to the next thing.”