Victor to launch Spread Betting Monday

It has been reported on the Financial Times that Monday will see the launch of Victor Chandler Financials, a joint venture with Worldspreads, the Dublin-based spread betting company, and he plans to initially start offering the service to the UK portion of Victor Chandler’s 1.7m global clients. Victor Chandler as a bookie mainly targets the Asian market and plans to make the spread betting offering available to his Asian patrons later this year.

‘I would have been more worried if we had launched in the latter quarter of last year when most of us who play the market had burned our fingers,’ says the 57-year-old chairman.

Mr Chandler is often seen as the last of the nicknamed so called ‘gentlemen bookmakers’. The Victor Chandler business was set up by his grandfather in 1946 and when his father, Victor Senior, died in 1974, Victor Chandler took over the business which he initially tried to sell but after some time decided to keep running it himself.

Victor Chandler led the bookmaking industry offshore to Gibraltar in 1998 to be able to offer tax free betting to his punters which was duly followed by Ladbrokes and other rivals and eventually this pushed the chancellor of England to abolish betting tax in 2001.

It is only a matter of time before other bookies join him and start offering financial spread betting, he believes, although Paddy Power beat him to it by 15 months in a joint venture with London Capital, and both Ladbrokes and W have tried it out without much success.

Tags: spread betting, Victor Chandler, Victor Chandler Financials

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Industry Happenings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.