ZEAL Network, an international Hamburg-headquartered gambling group, has reinforced its team with the addition of a vice president of new business. The one up to the task is Stefan Harder, an e-commerce heavyweight with over two decades of experience.

A Hamburg native, Harder joined ZEAL last month, reporting directly to Helmut Becket, ZEAL’s chief executive officer. In his new position, the hire is tasked with expanding the group and developing its proprietary charity lottery Deutsche Traumhauslotterie.

Harder boasts over 20 years of experience as an e-commerce specialist and entrepreneur. Prior to joining ZEAL, he had a short stint as the interim chief commercial officer of the heycar group. Before that, he worked as an independent e-commerce consultant, following a short tenure as the interim chief growth officer of Rebike Mobility.

Harder spent much of his career at Jollydays, an adventure gift company. He was one of its co-founders and served as its chief executive officer for around 17 years.

Harder is not the sole recent change to ZEAL’s team. In February, the company replaced Marc Peters with Kenneth Chan. In October 2022, the gambling group also welcomed Rodja Schmitz-Hübsch as its vice president of marketing, tasking him with optimizing customer engagement.

Harder Will Leverage His Know-How to Grow the Deutsche Traumhauslotterie

Stefan Harder expressed his excitement about joining ZEAL, saying that he is looking forward to growing Deutsche Traumhauslotterie. He hopes to establish the charity lottery as a major player in the German lottery market.

Harder said that he is very passionate about building and growing brands. He added that he sees a lot of potential in ZEAL’s charity lottery and praised the growth it has experienced since its creation. The appointee concluded that he will join forces with the ZEAL team to maintain this momentum.

ZEAL’s chief executive officer, Helmut Becker, welcomed the VP of new business on board, praising his experience in brand creation and e-commerce. Becker lauded Harder as a proven industry expert and a skilled entrepreneur.

According to ZEAL’s CEO, the Deutsche Traumhauslotterie needs talented people such as Harder to continue to grow and expand its market share. Becker concluded that Harder has infallible intuition and know-how that made him the perfect candidate for the VP position.

ZEAL is also the holding behind the popular LOTTO24 brand. In June, the company launched iGaming in Germany through LOTTO24 and Tipp24.

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The study’s broader scope is an attempt to better understand the money laundering and terrorist financing failings in the casino sector, and specifically the junket sector. The majority of those originate in casino junket operators, the AMLC argues, with the study flagging multiple transactions that should have been reported but hadn’t.

Junket Operators Feed Operators Wrong Data

Essentially, the AMLC contends that junket operators have not been flagging and reporting all issues with relevant parties, in this case, their casino partners, allowing suspicious transactions to clear, and potentially breaking AML and CFT controls in the industry as they failed to disclose the transactions. The AMLC has stopped short of publicly naming the offenders but argued that junket operators linked to prominent resorts had been found to underperform insofar as this was concerned.

Junkets have been a particularly hot topic in Asia. After the near-blanket ban on junket operators in Macau, other jurisdictions have started taking the matter more seriously. Some junket operators tried to blindside their partner casinos by issuing blank reports and claiming that they had not detected any suspicious transactions whatsoever.

However, casinos which did the snooping on their own discovered discrepancies in the report. One particular property used CCTV to establish that there seemed to be large volumes of cash being exchanged which the junket had failed to flag as suspicious. The junket of that particular casino argued that it was a genuine mistake rather than a premeditated act.

Regardless, the suspicion remains. In the particular case cited above, the AMLC claims that the casino was able to nevertheless submit 507 Suspicious Transaction Reports, indicative that the operator was determined to ensure that it complies with AML and CFT rules.

AMLC Says Operators Need to Hold Junkets Accountable

There are ways to counter such bad practices, however. The AMLC insists that should casino operators want to, they can monitor their relationship with junkets and ensure that they impress upon the junkets that reporting of suspicious transactions must happen accurately and transparently.

One of the most serious issues discovered by the AMLC remains the exchange of physical cash on casino floors, which casinos would have to work to tackle actively by raising the stakes for junket operators who may be turning a blind eye to paying customers who could be breaking AML and CFT rules.

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