IG Group will launch financial prediction markets for professional clients in the UK before the end of 2026 and has applied for a UK gambling licence so it can add sports, politics and entertainment markets early next year, the London-listed trading company said at its capital markets event on Thursday.

In a statement to the London Stock Exchange, IG said financial prediction markets will launch in Q4 2026 for UK professional clients, with the wider product set to follow in early 2027. The application for a gambling licence has been made by its IG Consumer subsidiary.

The plan makes IG one of the first established UK financial firms to bring exchange-style event contracts to the domestic market, where prediction markets of the kind offered by Kalshi and Polymarket in the US have no dedicated regulatory category. Products tied to sports and other non-financial outcomes would fall under the Gambling Commission’s remit, which explains the licence application.

Underdog deal on track

IG also said its acquisition of Underdog, the US daily fantasy sports and prediction markets operator, remains on track to complete in late 2026 or early 2027. The deal, announced on 30 July, is worth up to about $1.3 billion, made up of an upfront enterprise value of around $1.1 billion and an earnout of about $200 million. IG will pay the upfront consideration in a mix of new shares and cash and repay Underdog’s debt on completion, and it paused its share buyback to protect its investment-grade credit rating.

Underdog added prediction markets in September 2025 and, at the time of the announcement, was the third-largest US prediction market exchange by trading volume behind Kalshi and Robinhood. Crucially for IG, it holds a full stack of federal licences, including a designated contract market, a derivatives clearing organisation and a futures commission merchant. Underdog will continue to run as a standalone business under its own management. It is currently suing Tennessee over a cease-and-desist order targeting its sports event contracts, one of several state fights facing the sector.

Guidance and targets

For 2026, IG guided to mid-single-digit growth in total revenue and an EBITDA margin in the low 40s, excluding around £30 million of redomicile and restructuring costs and expenses related to Underdog. Over the medium term, excluding Underdog, it is targeting organic revenue growth of more than 10% a year from a 2025 base of about £1.1 billion, with an EBITDA margin in the mid-40s.

The company said Underdog should lift the combined group’s medium-term revenue growth above IG’s standalone rate, though the pro forma EBITDA margin would initially be lower and rise as the US business scales.

The UK rollout follows the same sequence IG has described for the wider business: start with financial event contracts, where it already holds regulatory permissions and serves an established base of active traders, then extend into sports and other outcomes once licensing allows. Limiting the first phase to professional clients also keeps the launch away from the retail protections that apply to most UK leveraged trading products while the model is tested.

“Trading, investing and entertainment are converging, and IG is well placed to capitalise on the opportunity,” chief executive Breon Corcoran said.

What it means for UK operators

A licensed prediction markets product from a listed UK trading firm would give the UK betting industry its first domestic test of how event contracts sit alongside fixed-odds sportsbooks and betting exchanges. In the US, sportsbook operators including DraftKings and FanDuel have launched their own prediction products in response to the growth of Kalshi and Polymarket. UK operators already facing higher remote gaming duty will be watching whether IG’s sports markets, once licensed, are treated as betting for tax and conduct purposes, and how the Gambling Commission frames the licence it grants.

The Premier League’s ban on gambling sponsors on the front of shirts has reduced fans’ exposure to gambling marketing during live matches by only 10.5%, according to new research from the University of Bristol.

The study, presented to the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Gambling Reform on 21 October, counted 15,571 gambling messages across the opening weekend of the 2026-27 season, from 21 to 24 August. That is lower than in 2024 but 41.6% higher than the 10,999 recorded in 2023, the first year of the series.

Logos moved, not removed

The front-of-shirt restriction, agreed by clubs in 2023 and in force from this season, almost eliminated gambling logos from shirt fronts. But branding on shirt sleeves and training kit rose by 362% compared with previous years, and pitchside advertising accounted for 72% of messages during live matches.

Across the seven live Premier League matches broadcast in the UK that weekend, researchers logged 11,205 messages, with gambling marketing visible for almost 20% of broadcast time. Newcastle United against Liverpool carried the most, with 2,702 messages, more than 12 a minute, and gambling visible for almost 41% of the broadcast.

The researchers found that live-match messages were down 35.9% on the 2023 to 2025 average, but said most of that fall came from fewer sponsorship “lead-ins” around broadcasts, which no regulatory measure targeted. Stripping those out, they attribute a 10.5% reduction to the shirt ban.

Broadcast and social media

The team also monitored 15 hours of Sky Sports News, which carried 2,637 messages, and 15 hours of talkSPORT radio, which carried 207, with at least one gambling advert in every commercial break. On social media, the ten gambling brands with the largest followings ran 1,023 paid adverts on Facebook and Instagram, with an estimated UK reach of 153.2 million accounts, 16.6 million of them belonging to users aged 18 to 24.

The report found that 93% of gambling content was not clearly identifiable as advertising, and that unlicensed brands still gained exposure through Premier League coverage. Over the four years of the series, Premier League matches averaged 2,449 gambling messages per game, compared with 1,677 in Germany’s Bundesliga.

The comparison with North America was starker still: NBA and NHL broadcasts in the US averaged 483 gambling messages per game, and 505 in Canada. The research was funded by the University of Bristol, with former England goalkeeper Peter Shilton and his wife Steph as longstanding patrons of the project.

“This cannot be presented as a success for self-regulation,” said project lead Dr Raffaello Rossi, senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Bristol Business School, according to the university’s release.

Pressure for mandatory rules

The report also criticised the industry’s digital advertising code, which requires paid adverts to target over-25s unless platforms can demonstrate reliable age checks, noting that the list of exempt platforms was changed to include Instagram without notice or published evidence.

Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP, co-chair of the APPG, said the findings were “further evidence that the voluntary approach to gambling advertising in football is failing”. The group is calling on the government to introduce stricter statutory rules on gambling advertising and close loopholes in the current mix of self-regulation and Advertising Standards Authority oversight.

The findings land as the UK industry is already grappling with higher taxes, and they are likely to strengthen calls for statutory limits on sports sponsorship and pitchside advertising, which until now have been left to voluntary codes.

Utah has sued prediction market operator Kalshi in state court, arguing that its sports, election and other event contracts amount to illegal gambling and constitute a public nuisance under state law.

Attorney General Derek Brown announced the 63-page lawsuit on Tuesday 20 October. It was filed in the 3rd District Court in Salt Lake City and names Kalshi, KalshiEx, Kalshi Klear and Kalshi Trading, along with market maker Susquehanna International Group and Susquehanna Government Products, according to the Deseret News.

What Utah is asking for

The state wants the court to stop Kalshi operating in Utah, including by requiring a court-approved geolocation provider to block sports, election, politics, culture and “mention” contracts for users in the state. It is also seeking restitution and the disgorgement of profits.

Based on Kalshi’s fee of one to two cents per contract, the state estimates that the company earned between $30.5m and $61.1m from Utah accounts. The complaint says more than 32,000 Utah residents had verified Kalshi accounts as of February 2026, and that Utah bettors lost at least $5.5m.

The suit alleges that Kalshi began offering contracts to Utah residents by September 2024 at the latest, advertised itself as “legal in all 50 states”, and had a representative film an advert on the Brigham Young University campus. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that the state describes Kalshi as “the manager of a back-alley gambling den”.

“Frankly, they are engineered to do one thing and one thing alone, and that is to empty your wallet,” Brown said when announcing the case.

Kalshi’s response

Kalshi maintains that it is a federally regulated derivatives exchange overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and that state gambling law does not apply to its contracts. Spokesperson Jacki McGavick said the company answers to federal law and that the state action does not affect its ongoing federal litigation, adding that “no single state should have a veto” over a national market.

The two sides are already in federal court. Kalshi sued Utah in February, pre-emptively seeking to block enforcement of the state’s gambling laws against its sports contracts. In August, US District Judge Robert Shelby ruled that Utah’s anti-gambling laws apply to those contracts and that the federal Commodity Exchange Act does not pre-empt state enforcement.

A widening front

Utah also joined 40 other states and the District of Columbia earlier this year in a letter to the CFTC arguing that the federal regulator lacks jurisdiction over sports wagering offered through prediction markets. Governor Spencer Cox has described the contracts as gambling “pure and simple”.

Utah is one of only two US states that prohibit all forms of gambling, and its leaders have been among the most vocal opponents of sports event contracts. At least nine states have now brought legal action against prediction market platforms, most of it civil, although Arizona has filed a criminal complaint.

The Utah filing comes in the same week that Polymarket sued Ohio over its crackdown on sports event contracts, and against a split in the federal courts. A federal judge blocked Illinois from applying its gambling rules to Kalshi earlier this month, while 39 states have urged the Supreme Court to take up New Jersey’s case against the company.

Kalshi chief executive Tarek Mansour told Reuters this week that the dispute could end up before the Supreme Court. By moving in state court on public nuisance and restitution grounds, Utah is testing a route that, if it succeeds, other states could copy without waiting for that ruling.