The Cost of Complexity: When Growth Stops Being Linear

Growth is usually discussed in positive terms: more markets, more products, more customers, more revenue. Every new layer also adds complexity, and it does not always grow in a straight line, because markets, products and customers interact with each other. For a CFO, one of the fundamental questions behind growth is “How much revenue will this generate?” It is quickly followed by “What complexity are we adding to generate it, and is the return worth it?”

“Cost of complexity” is a finance term many people may not know. What does it mean for a business like BETER?

You won’t find a line called “cost of complexity” in the P&L. It is spread across the organisation, in additional people, technology, compliance requirements, integrations, reporting and working capital, and in less visible costs such as management attention, slower decisions and a growing number of exceptions. Big decisions, such as a new market or product, come with a business case, so their costs are visible. The more expensive complexity often looks small: a slightly different integration, a custom report, a non-standard commercial term. Each one has to be maintained and supported, and they multiply across markets, products and clients. A company with one product, one market and ten customers is a different proposition from one with five products, twenty markets and a hundred customers, because you have created hundreds of additional combinations to manage. Some complexity creates enormous value. The task is to distinguish valuable complexity from complexity the customer is not ultimately willing to pay for.

When an operator enters a new territory or integrates fast-paced content, they often want better commercial terms to offset the risk. How does that affect your costs and margins?

That is understandable, and the important question is how the risk is shared. Introductory terms can make sense, with pricing structured around ramp-up periods, volumes or milestones. The problem arises when temporary uncertainty creates permanent underpricing, because our costs do not fall just because an operator is testing a new market. We still need technology, data, trading, streaming, integrity monitoring and the infrastructure behind them. If we believe in the potential, we can share some early-stage risk, provided there is a credible path to scale. Without that, somebody is financing the experiment indefinitely.

Can you give an example of something you turned down because it didn’t stand up once you ran the numbers?

I wouldn’t discuss individual counterparties, but yes, there are opportunities where the headline revenue looks far more attractive than the economics underneath. A typical example is a deal with heavy customisation or integration work, low committed volumes and long payment terms. Once you account for implementation, ongoing support, working capital and the opportunity cost of the people involved, the return looks very different. Often the better answer is to restructure the deal rather than reject it, by changing the pricing, narrowing the scope or adding volume thresholds. One of the CFO’s roles is to make sure we are not confusing revenue with value.

What has to be paid for when entering a new regulated market before any revenue comes back, and how do you decide whether a market is worth entering?

The obvious costs are licensing, external advisers, certifications and product adaptations. There are also internal legal and compliance resources, technology work, commercial preparation, tax analysis and management time. The US is a good example, because each state has its own framework, so entering “the US market” effectively means entering many markets one at a time. BETER entered the regulated US market in 2025 and by October 2026 had approvals in ten states, as well as Ontario and Alberta in Canada. Before entering, we look beyond theoretical size. How much of the market is realistically addressable, how quickly can we monetise the investment, what margin should we expect, and can the infrastructure be reused elsewhere? I am generally more concerned with how reusable an investment is than with its size. A large market is not attractive if the cost and time needed to access it are disproportionate.

Suppliers across iGaming are constantly pushed on price. How does BETER negotiate with its own partners, and what happens when suppliers repeatedly give in?

We sit on both sides of the table, so I think we owe our suppliers the same rationality we expect from our customers. Of course we negotiate, and procurement should challenge cost. There is a difference between reducing cost and simply transferring margin from one company to another. If you keep pushing a strategically important supplier below sustainable economics, they invest less, service levels deteriorate and innovation slows, and in an extreme case the supplier disappears. The cheaper solution becomes more expensive over time. Procurement should be about total value and total cost, which can be quite different from the lowest unit price.

You’ve spent much of your career outside iGaming. What have you brought from those industries, and what doesn’t work here?

I’ve worked in metals and mining, agriculture and technology. Capital-intensive industries make you disciplined about capital allocation, agriculture teaches you about volatility and working capital, and audit taught me to understand how the numbers are actually constructed. All of that transfers well. Speed of decision-making transfers less well. A process that takes three months to approve an investment may produce a beautifully controlled decision that arrives two months too late. I prefer guardrails rather than gates: clear investment principles, good data, defined accountability and fast escalation when something falls outside normal parameters.

If you were speaking to a CFO whose business is growing very quickly, what would you tell them to watch?

The gap between growth and economic quality. Revenue is the loudest number in a growing business, and complexity tends to show up elsewhere: in gross margin, headcount, working capital, the number of exceptions people are managing and, eventually, in how quickly the organisation can decide. I would watch unit economics, cash conversion, fixed-cost growth and the amount of bespoke activity building up, and ask repeatedly: Are we building capabilities that make the next stage of growth easier, or adding resources simply to cope with the growth we already created? There is nothing wrong with complexity that produces value. When it grows faster than the organisation’s capabilities, growth becomes expensive and eventually fragile. The CFO’s job is to help the business keep growing without losing the economics that made the growth attractive.