IG Group exits gambling in 2011, re-enters with licence bid in 2026

Breon Corcoran ran Betfair. He ran Paddy Power Betfair. He left in January 2018, and the decade that followed was, from a prediction markets perspective, the quiet before something. On Thursday, IG Group announced it had applied for a UK gambling licence through a London subsidiary called IG View Limited, listed on the Gambling Commission's public register under the trading name "ig prediction markets," with one pending activity: a remote general betting licence for real events.

IG sold the customer base of its Extrabet betting arm to Spreadex in 2011. Fifteen years later, the same company is asking a regulator for permission to come back. The CEO who made that decision is a man who spent years building the infrastructure of exchange-style betting before the category existed in its current form.

The structure of the re-entry is deliberate. British regulation cuts this product in two: the FCA treats contracts on financial outcomes as binary options, banned for retail investors since 2019, while sports and politics contracts fall to the Gambling Commission. IG is threading between the two regulators, planning to launch financial event contracts for UK professional clients first, then open sports and politics contracts once the gambling licence clears, which it expects in early 2027. No licence has been granted yet.

The Underdog acquisition, agreed in July for up to approximately $1.3 billion and expected to close in late 2026 or early 2027, gives IG the US distribution it would otherwise spend years building. The UK bid gives it a home market and a regulatory template that US operators are still fighting courts to establish. Corcoran's line in the announcement — "trading, investing and entertainment are converging" — reads less like a vision statement and more like a description of what he has already decided to build.

Here is where the reporting stops and the analysis starts. The consensus read on IG's move is that a large, well-capitalised incumbent is entering a growth market at scale, and the question is how quickly it can capture share. The consensus is probably wrong about the shape of the risk, though right about the direction of travel.

The licensing route IG is taking is the one the Gambling Commission flagged in February as the framework most likely to cover prediction markets. Betfair holds a betting intermediary licence. Spreadex and Sporting Index hold the same general betting licence IG has requested. Neither Kalshi nor Polymarket appears on the register. IG is not racing to catch up with US operators in the UK — it is racing to establish itself before they arrive, and it is doing so through the one regulatory pathway that currently works.

The market being built here is not the market that exists today. Taker volume across Kalshi and Polymarket reached $172.4 billion in the third quarter alone. That number doubled in one quarter. IG is applying for a licence in a regulatory environment where the product is legal, the framework is established, and the incumbent competitors have not yet shown up. Corcoran knows what an exchange looks like before it scales. He built one.