Matchbook’s acquisition of fellow UK and Ireland heritage betting exchange Betdaq last week caught the attention of many in the gambling industry. Two weeks prior to that, Ronan McDonagh, Chief Executive Officer of Matchbook, sat down with SBC News to discuss what may lie ahead for the company in the future.
“There are very few peer-to-peer licenses in the UK at the moment. It’s not a flooded market like sportsbooks, which gives us a massive advantage.”
That was a statement which Ronan McDonagh, CEO of Matchbook, gave to SBC News at the SBC Summit in Lisbon.
Since then, that very same market has undergone a huge change, as Matchbook itself acquired a fellow major player in the UK’s betting exchange industry in Betdaq.
The deal was announced last week and leaves the sector looking very threadbare with the only recognisable big exchanges now being Matchbook, Betfair Exchange, Smarkets and Spreadex.
Negativity for exchanges, but not for Matchbook
In the UK, gross gambling yield (GGY) for exchanges decreased again in 2025/26 and has now nearly halved in the last decade – GGY 2025/26: £92.66m, GGY 2016/17: £171.53m.
McDonagh described the market and its consumers as “a bit old-fashioned” but made clear that Matchbook is “trying to eat away at that” through its recent developments.
Despite said old-fashionedness, the CEO also claimed that the company has bucked this trend. The deal for Betdaq should only help to improve that cause as it “deepens the pool at the heart of everything we build”.
“It’s quite clear that we’re actually trending in the opposite direction. So while the overall piece of the pie is shrinking, our market share has increased quite a lot,” McDonagh explained to SBC News.
“We’ve been doing a lot of interesting stuff with bookmakers on the track in the UK and Ireland, they feed alert volume to us, and the product has just got better.
“We have a very sustainable exchange to work with, and I think we’re just getting a bit more confident. We’ve been the underdog for so long, but recent partnerships have certainly brought me into another world of brand exposure, which would otherwise be very hard for us to capture.”
The deal also substantially increases Matchbook’s on-course presence. Betdaq had the largest market share of on-course bookmakers across the UK and Ireland who connected to the exchange for pricing information and hedging purposes, and that will now be transferred to Matchbook.
A deal on a global scale
Another topic which has been understated since the deal is the global footprint which it has.
Betdaq allowed players from 26 countries to open an account, including Argentina, Mexico, Croatia and Costa Rica. Meanwhile, Matchbook is active across the UK and Ireland, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, and is set to launch very soon in the US as it looks to capitalise on the prediction markets boom.
Marketing itself as a major player in the space globally post-acquisition is a necessity if the combined business wants to tackle the vice-like grip that the Betfair Exchange currently has on the space in the UK.
The business managed to do that over the summer via a white-label deal with 2026 FIFA World Cup official prediction market partner, ADI Predictstreet. Matchbook’s presence on LED advertising during Scotland’s opening game against Haiti – a 2:00am GMT kick off – gave its platform “more page views than Grand National Day”.
And while McDonagh admits that the company has never marketed to that level and “probably never will again”, that is the sort of exposure necessary to shift from the tag of underdog to frontrunner.
On the topic of development and expansion, he added: “We’re creating a lot of products. On top of the UK, which has become a tricky market, we’ve used the opportunity to move into Brazil, ignoring what happened last month.
“We have moved into South Africa and Mexico, and then with that brought opportunity in the US with prediction markets. We’ve done a reskin, applied for a CFTC license, so that gives us a massive opportunity in a massive market. “
“We’ve been quite busy. If we were UK-only, it would have been quite challenging, but now we can grow a lot more diversely.”
A personal one for the CEO
The deal is also a sentimental one for McDonagh, who started in the exchange space with Betdaq. He spent nearly a decade as a Senior Trader at the business between 2005-2014.
That does not mean that it is one completed on emotions rather than strategy.
McDonagh explained this via a post on LinkedIn. “I meet ex-Betdaq people everywhere I travel who have gone onto many exciting roles and companies in this industry,” he wrote.
“The education they received at Betdaq stands to them because exchanges are hard. If you understand exchanges, you’ll understand the wider gambling world too.
“While one chapter closes, many exciting ones are on the horizon.”
