In the latest episode of iGaming Accent, host Vakho Mdivani welcomes Sanja Isakov, General Manager of Rizk.rs (Betsson Serbia), for a conversation about the Serbian and wider Balkan market – the enduring strength of retail, the shift to online, an increasingly sophisticated regulatory environment, and what it actually takes for an international brand to succeed locally.
Sanja’s path into iGaming was not planned. She studied accounting and auditing and began her career as a trainee at a local audit firm – an experience she still credits as formative: “When you are working in auditing, you need to learn things very quickly. You need to understand not only the numbers, you need to understand the product, the risk, the financial statements, everything, what is behind the businesses.”
After a spell in financial control at an international production company, she joined a startup in 2013 that would later become AskGamblers. “At that time, this world was completely new to me. But because it was a startup, my role wasn’t only finance… I was very quickly involved in all kinds of operations, in sales, in commercials, in building teams.”
Following AskGamblers’ acquisition by Catena Media, she moved to MaxBet – and with it, from the affiliate side to the operator side. It was, she says, the defining shift of her career: “Finance taught me to measure the business, and operations taught me actually how to build it.”
What she found at Maxbet was familiar territory in unfamiliar packaging: “It was a small startup in a huge company.” Online was still nascent in Serbia, the team was being built from scratch, and “most of the team, they didn’t even understand what was online at that time.”
On the retail-to-online transition, Sanja identifies COVID as the accelerant: “That was actually the shift when the strong retail in Serbia… shifted in a faster way than in a usual period; it’s not going to be like that at all.” But she is clear that retail has not gone away – Serbia still has around 25 online operators and some 50 licensed retail betting operators, and the cash culture persists.
She offers a vivid illustration of how habits outlive channels: “You will have, for example, a player who is still sitting in the betting shop but playing online.”
Much of the episode turns on her argument about localization – a subject on which she is emphatic. International operators, she says, must go far beyond surface-level analysis: “Not just looking at the market size, competitors and general statistics. They need to understand the history of the market, how mature the market is, player behavior, what product they want, deposits, withdrawal money, what are the payment methods, and in general, what are the habits and culture.”
Proximity, she warns, is a false signal: “Geography doesn’t mean similar behavior… If you take Serbia and Greece, we are relatively close, and from an international perspective we might even be placed in the same region, but that doesn’t mean that players behave the same way.”
Her definition is unambiguous: “Localization for me, it’s not just translation. You need to be extremely committed and to understand the local player, and this is something that has to be built locally.”
And small does not mean easy: “Even if Serbia is a very small market, it’s extremely competitive… You’re entering a whole ecosystem where customers already have established habits, relationships actually with the brands.”
Sanja also discussed Serbia’s maturing regulation and the 2025 changes, the product mix rebalancing to 50/50 between betting and online casino, the coming market consolidation, the role of AI, and more.
She also responded to a question from Liutauras Ulevičius, President of the National Gambling and Gaming Business Association in Lithuania, and posed one of his own for the next guest.
To hear the whole conversation and gain even deeper insights, listen to the complete podcast episode of iGaming Accent.
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