1. Reflection
I nearly passed on a candidate a few years ago because their CV had nothing gambling shaped on it at all, no operator name I recognised, no regulator they had dealt with, nothing that let me tick the box marked knows this industry, and it took a colleague pointing out that what the role at TGB actually needed was someone who could build and interrogate a model, not someone who already knew what a Gambling Commission licence condition looked like, for me to reconsider. We are a research and insight business, not an operator, so the stakes of that hire were nowhere near what they are for a compliance or risk appointment inside a licensed business, but I think about that moment a lot now, because the same tension is playing out across the operators I work with at a much higher stakes level, and the data backs up what my colleague saw before I did.
Pentasia’s own salary survey found iGaming pay rose 4.09% in 2025, the fastest growth in three years, and the roles driving it were tech, data, AI and compliance, not the generalist operational roles the industry used to promote from within almost automatically. Pentasia’s Darren Kirby put it plainly: that positions which once needed nothing more than SQL and Tableau now often require machine learning and automation skills as standard, and that employers are increasingly willing to recruit from fintech and other sectors when the technical depth needed outweighs the value of gambling-specific experience. Alastair Cleland, Pentasia’s MD, made the point that stuck with me hardest: hiring managers now want to know what a candidate can actually do, not what a large language model could do for them, which is a blunt way of saying pedigree on its own has stopped being proof of capability.
2. Global Connection
This is not a dilemma unique to gambling, and banking got there first in a way that is worth an operator’s HR function actually reading rather than treating as background colour. Russell Reynolds Associates studied bank and insurance chief compliance officers over a decade and found the share coming from a legal background fell from 55% of appointees before 2013 to 29% after it, while those with a direct compliance background fell from 45% to 24%, and 42% of recent appointees instead came from what the report called middle office roles, operational risk, internal audit, consulting, and the kind of adjacent, adaptable experience that would once have been seen as a weaker bet than a straight compliance pedigree.
More recent data shows the pattern accelerating rather than settling: a 2025 compliance recruitment survey found technology-related skills now account for 52% of financial crime compliance hiring spend, up from 34% just three years earlier, and 68% of employers now cite insufficient technical or regulatory knowledge, not a lack of candidates, as their biggest hiring obstacle. Compliance Week’s reporting on how banks are preparing for 2026 describes leading institutions treating AI literacy as a core competency on the same footing as regulatory expertise, training compliance staff to question and refine what a model tells them rather than simply accept it.
Gambling is having the same argument a decade later, and SOFTSWISS gave it a concrete shape in January when it named Denis Romanovskiy, previously its Deputy CTO with a background at EPAM Systems and Wargaming rather than in compliance, as the company’s first Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, a clear marker that the skills the industry now needs most sit closer to engineering than to sector tenure.
3. The Case for Moving Now
Here is what I would tell any operator leader still weighing pedigree against adaptability the way I once did on a much smaller hire. The industry does not have the luxury of waiting for a generation of gambling-native compliance and risk professionals to also become fluent in machine learning, because the roles are changing faster than any one career can retrain itself, and the operators already treating adaptability as the primary hiring criterion, willing to bring in people from fintech, insurance and neobanking the way Brazil’s newer entrants are reportedly doing, are simply going to fill their AI and risk functions faster and better than the ones holding out for a unicorn who already has both.
I am not arguing that sector knowledge is worthless; it still matters enormously for judgement calls that need context a newcomer will not have on day one, but I am arguing that it should stop being the first filter on a CV, because the candidate who can build the model and explain why it is wrong half the time is more valuable to a modern compliance function than the candidate who merely knows what the acronyms stand for. Build the onboarding that gets an adaptable outsider fluent in your regulatory context within months, rather than continuing to filter for people who arrived already fluent, because the pool of those people is shrinking exactly as the roles you need filled are multiplying.
4. Boardroom Questions
1. When we last hired for a compliance, risk or AI-focused role, did we filter candidates by sector pedigree first, and would that filter have screened out the strongest technical candidate?
2. Do we have an onboarding process that can make an adaptable outsider fluent in our regulatory context within months, or are we still assuming that fluency only comes from years already spent in gambling?
3. Looking at banking’s decade-long shift away from legal and compliance pedigree toward adjacent, adaptable experience, where is our own compliance function on that same curve today?
Sources
1. iGamingBusiness, iGaming salaries rise 4.09% as AI and flexibility reshape talent market, iGB-Pentasia Salary Survey 2025, 15 December 2025, https://igamingbusiness.com/people/igaming-salaries-rise-pentasia-salary-survey/
2. iGamingBusiness, iGB-Pentasia Salary Survey: How 2025 developments are reshaping iGaming salary trends, 18 December 2025, https://igamingbusiness.com/people/recruitment/igb-pentasia-salary-survey-2025-5/
3. iGamingBusiness, iGB-Pentasia Salary Survey: The global view of iGaming hiring policy in 2025, 17 December 2025, https://igamingbusiness.com/people/recruitment/igb-pentasia-salary-survey-2025-4/
4. PR Newswire, SOFTSWISS Appoints Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, 26 January 2026, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/softswiss-appoints-chief-artificial-intelligence-officer-302668031.html
5. Bank Director, Banks Are Struggling to Find Compliance Officers, 28 June 2024, https://www.bankdirector.com/article/banks-are-struggling-to-find-compliance-officers/
6. Russell Reynolds Associates, How the Chief Compliance Officer role is transforming across Financial Services, https://www.russellreynolds.com/en/insights/reports-surveys/how-the-chief-compliance-officer-role-is-transforming-across-financial-services
7. Barclay Simpson, The 2025 Compliance and Financial Crime Salaries and Recruitment Trends Guide, updated 9 April 2026, https://www.barclaysimpson.com/salary-guides/2025-compliance-financial-crime-salaries-and-recruitment-trends-guide/ (Tier 2, cross-referenced against Bank Director and Compliance Week, both Tier 1, which independently confirm the same shift toward technology skills in bank compliance hiring)
8. Compliance Week, The next era of compliance: How banks will stay ahead of financial crime in 2026, 20 March 2026, https://www.complianceweek.com/technology/the-next-era-of-compliance-how-banks-will-stay-ahead-of-financial-crime-in-2026/