Fa Cai Shen

How to play Fa Cai Shen

Cubeia set out to remove coding as the constraint on software development, but in doing so, the company has discovered that coding was only one constraint in a much larger system. As the bottleneck moves, so do the demands on the organisation: towards domain knowledge, product thinking, quality, prioritisation and understanding what customers need.

The technology itself has therefore become less important to the story.

What Cubeia does with the technology moving forward has become the focal point.

What is Fa Cai Shen?

Yet Dan Waugh, partner at Regulus Partners, pushes back against the idea that enforcement notices reveal a fundamentally non-compliant sector.

“Operators failing compliance checks is never a good look,” he says. Campaigners often claim that financial sanctions are priced in and that the Commission should revoke more licences, although Waugh does not believe operators view settlements merely as a cost of doing business.

Nor are regulatory breaches unique to gambling. Waugh notes that Tesco was fined more than £8 million for food hygiene failings in 2021, without parliamentarians demanding that it should be prevented from selling cornflakes.

How to play Fa Cai Shen

They took the dispute to international arbitration, claiming Laos had violated investment treaties protecting their businesses.

The two sides reached a settlement in 2014, but that agreement also fell apart, and the casino companies renewed their claims.

Ultimately, the gamble backfired.