About this app
How to play Hammerfall
Cyprus is not the first market to consider whether to block its welfare recipients from using their benefits to gamble, Brazil introduced a similar ban in 2025.
During a session of the House Audit Committee last Thursday, members of parliament (MPs), the Data Protection Commissioner and representatives from the Welfare Benefits Administration Service (WBAS), the Gaming & Casino Supervision Commission and the National Betting Authority (NBA) convened to discuss ways to identify and restrict gambling activity among GMI beneficiaries, as reported by Cyprus Mail.
While the intention is to protect vulnerable households and ensure welfare is spent on essential needs, proposed measures are being complicated by legal, technical and privacy obstacles.
What is Hammerfall?
Allwyn has announced the appointment of former Playtech executive Francesco Rodano as its new group head of responsible gaming.
Rodano spent almost ten years spearheading policy at Playtech as the supplier’s chief policy officer. Then between January last year and August 2026, he led its global player-protection efforts as chief sustainable gambling officer.
During his tenure, Rodano was instrumental in deploying an AI-powered behavioural analytics platform, BetBuddy, which is designed to identify and intervene in potentially harmful gambling behaviours.
What is Hammerfall?
“The bottleneck becomes the person reviewing everything. That does not mean we never review the code itself. For sensitive or critical parts of the system, we still look more closely at the implementation, particularly from an architecture, performance, security and reliability perspective. But we no longer apply that level of manual code review to everything.” Grenstad says.
The shift to AI is also changing how Grenstad thinks about recruitment. A team working on the player journey, for example, needs people who understand casinos, iGaming and what a strong player experience should look like.
“I would not necessarily prioritise senior Java or front-end specialists in the same way as before,” Grenstad explains. “Technical skills remain important, particularly for people who can assess architecture and ensure systems remain reliable, but domain knowledge is becoming increasingly valuable. I’d rather take someone who’s good in the domain but doesn’t know any Java.”
