IG Group to launch UK prediction market platform

IG Group plans UK prediction market entry as Polymarket's IPO path narrows

In the same week Polymarket's chief marketing officer was terminated following an internal investigation, IG Group quietly filed its intention to enter the UK prediction market by 2027. The timing is not coincidental in what it reveals, even if the two companies share no operational connection.

Start with what the investigation actually found. Between January 2025 and February 2026, more than $2.5 million moved through Matthew Modabber's personal PayPal account to over 800 recipients. At least $350,000 of that went to influencers who posted videos depicting customers winning approximately $1.9 million through the platform — trades that were simulated, not real. This was not a rogue campaign that escaped internal review. Modabber was one of Polymarket's earliest executives, hired in 2024 by founder and CEO Shayne Coplan. The promotional structure that produced these payments was built inside the company, not around it.

The separation agreement is reportedly still being finalised. Neither party has made a public statement. That silence is doing work — it is preserving optionality on the IPO question, which Polymarket has also declined to address directly. The connection between the two is not subtle. You do not fire your CMO, tighten internal controls, and announce enhanced regulatory compliance in the same breath without an audience in mind. That audience is either a regulator, a public market, or both.

Here is where I think the consensus reads this wrong. Most commentary frames the Modabber termination as a reputational correction — painful but bounded. I think it is more structurally costly than that. The $2.5 million in PayPal flows is not a disclosure problem that better legal review fixes going forward. It is evidence of a growth model built on manufactured credibility at a moment when the platform's entire value proposition rests on the integrity of its prices. If the signals that attract users to a prediction market were themselves simulated, the question of whether those users then priced contracts accurately becomes harder to answer. This is not a marketing compliance issue. It touches the epistemic foundation of what the platform claims to sell.

Which is precisely the opening IG Group is moving into. IG is not a startup constructing legitimacy from scratch. It is a regulated financial services firm with an existing UK compliance infrastructure and a client base that already trades derivatives. A prediction market built on that foundation starts from a different position than one that grew through influencer seeding and viral trading videos. Whether IG can actually build liquidity competitive with established platforms by 2027 is a separate question — thin order books are a structural problem that brand credibility alone does not solve, and I have seen well-capitalised entrants miscalculate that gap before. But the regulatory posture IG brings to the UK market is exactly what Polymarket is now scrambling to construct retroactively.

The UK launch timeline also matters because it arrives as the US legal environment around prediction markets remains unresolved. A company that can demonstrate clean regulatory compliance in a jurisdiction with functioning financial oversight has a proof of concept that carries weight with institutional counterparties. That is not the market Polymarket has been building toward. The question of whether it can credibly pivot there, under current leadership, with an unresolved separation agreement still in process, is genuinely open.