A licence is shaped by who it is for and where it bites

Entry 1The consumer licence

The licence most players mean is the business-to-consumer one: permission to take bets from the public. It is usually the most heavily conditioned, because it is the one that touches a person's money directly. Where a regulator is serious, a B2C licence tends to carry obligations about how customer funds are held, how complaints are answered, what is reported after the fact, and what happens when the operator wants to stop serving a market.

What it does not do is price anything. A consumer licence says nothing about the house edge, the generosity of a bonus, or whether the withdrawal takes a day or a week — those live in the terms and in game maths. The licence fixes the perimeter of the game, not its odds.

Entry 2The supply licence

Behind many operators sits a second kind of licence, granted to suppliers rather than to players: permission to provide gambling services to licensed operators. Software platforms, game studios, and sometimes payment and data providers hold these. The point is a chain of accountability — the authority can reach a supplier whose product an operator is using.

The trap for a player is to mistake a supplier licence for a consumer one. A studio's name on a game, or a platform's name in a footer, is not evidence that the site in front of you may take your bet. The supplier is licensed to supply; somebody else must be licensed to operate. Read which entity holds what.

Entry 3The national licence

A national licence is issued under a single country's law and is designed for that country: its tax regime, its age rules, its advertising limits and its own complaint route. Its great advantage is that it means something where you are, because the authority shares your courts and your consumer law. Its great limitation is that it is usually narrow — written for one market, one currency or one set of products.

When a site holds a national licence for one country and serves the rest of the world under something else, the protections you get depend on which licence your account is actually booked under. That is not always the one with the recognisable name on the homepage.

Entry 4The offshore licence

Many online operators are licensed in a small jurisdiction rather than the country the player sits in. These licences are real instruments issued by real authorities, and they usually cost less and move faster than a national one. What they tend to lack is reach into your country. The authority may be able to fine or strike off the operator, but it is not your consumer authority, it does not answer to your courts, and its register may say less about the operator's conduct.

That is a difference of degree, not of honesty. Some offshore regimes are serious and some are thin; the same word, "licensed", covers both. The useful question is not "offshore or not" but "which authority, with what powers, and can I reach it".

Entry 5The multi-jurisdiction licence

Large groups often hold licences in several jurisdictions at once, because different markets require different permissions or the same product is offered under different entities. The permission layer for one website can therefore be several licences stacked, each covering a slice of the operation.

Entry 6Reading the shape before the details

Fastest way to sort a licence claim is to ask which shape it is, then whether that shape can protect you where you are.

Entry 7Where this goes next

Knowing the shapes is the vocabulary. The next page turns to the bodies that actually issue these instruments, because the authority named in a register entry decides almost everything else — its powers, its register, its complaint route and its willingness to use them.