In the hours most find themselves unwinding from what may have been a strenuous day at the office, a single desire ignites Lara Falzon, a light which has remained on throughout her decade-plus tenure in the gaming industry. Even while beginning her financial career with companies such as Ernst & Young and the BMW Group, Falzon strived for greater challenges in life, a desire which may stem from a childhood of watching her father build his own company from the ground up.

Despite not seeing him as frequently as other children, Falzon understood the hard work required to accomplish what her father had set out to attain, as well as the long hours away from home it took to do so. Coming from a non-academic background, Falzon’s parents spent much of their time constructing a life full of opportunity for herself and her sister, passing on the value of working harder than those around you. This was best exemplified after Falzon’s father spent an entire year saving up enough funds to purchase a small boat, helping the future gaming executive understand “anything can be achieved” if one is willing to put in the time. The chance to see firsthand which skills were necessary in forming a small business translated to an early passion forfinance, even to the point of a 10-year-old Falzon learning how to complete value-added tax (VAT) statements and income returns.

“I remember my dad going to his accountant and asking all these hard questions, but this guy knew everything. So from a young age, actually at the age of 10, I already knew I wanted to become an accountant; because I saw this man as the guy who knew everything and as the guy my dad relied on,” Falzon tells Global Gaming Insider. “He used to take care of all the VAT statements for my dad, so I asked him if he could teach me how to do them. He said I was too young, of course. But I wanted to learn, so he taught me and after that I started doing all the VAT statements and income tax returns for my dad, which also got me introduced to the world of accounting.”

Straight A's

Falzon’s interest in finance and accounting was multiplied by a motivation to attend the University of Malta, which many scholastic advisors stated was out of the realm of possibility for most students. Knowing she could never let a doubter be proven right, Falzon threw herself into her studies from that point on, even going as far as being reprimanded by her parents for “studying too much.”

“For me, getting a B wasn’t good enough. It had to be an A. My parents used to fight with me to stop studying and stop stressing out rather than the other way around. From a very young age I was laser focused because I wanted to achieve things, and I was never happy with what I had. I was always looking at the next stage to a certain extent,” Falzon reflects.
Maintaining the required academic results and test scores throughout her teenage years, Falzon was accepted into the University of Malta and earned her Bachelor of Commerce, before also gaining certification from the Association of Chartered Accountants at the beginning her professional career. Starting at Ernst & Young in 2006, Falzon was immediately the first one into the office and last one out because she was hungry “to achieve more and learn more” from an industry she had been infatuated with just a decade into her life.

Going on to spend nearly three and a half years with Ernst & Young, Falzon found herself jaded with the specific realm of auditing in 2009, when she would eventually be appointed as an Accountant & Controller for the BMW Group by September. Falzon explains: “I decided auditing was too boring for me, I really wanted to be in the industry and actually be part of a proper accounts department. I joined BMW, where my job was more treasury financial services back then, so I started exploring and traveling to other countries. I was working remotely between Germany and Malta, commuting a lot, but that opened the world of multinationals and obviously I didn’t look back after that.” While Ernst & Young and BMW Group are certainly well-established companies, Falzon couldn’t knock the inherited desire to build success from square one. She ultimately chose to depart the BMW Group after nearly three years and just two months since taking over as Head of Accounting & Controlling in 2013.

Going mobile

Falzon would be exposed to the gaming industry for the first time after joining King Digital Entertainment as a Financial Controller, helping oversee the eventual launch of Candy Crush, a highly popular mobile game among global players. Even with Candy Crush featuring key differences to that of online slots or table games, the offering’s success helped Falzon understand the vast potential gaming held for driving revenue. By September 2023, King confirmed Candy Crush had generated more than $20bn in profit just over a decade since launch, entirely based around in-app purchases and advertising revenue for the supplier. Finding King had been a “pure accident” for Falzon after wanting to gain more exposure to multinationals, even planning to “spend her life” with the BMW Group prior to getting approached by a King recruiter. Falzon, though, took a “leap of faith” and joined the online games supplier, spending her opening months questioning the decision.

“To be fair, I think it took me a good four months to say I made the right choice. You have no idea how many times I was sitting in an office asking myself ‘what have I done? What are these people doing? Maybe I should leave.’ Thank God I didn’t, because that element of patience paid off in the end; but it wasn’t an easy ride in the beginning,” Falzon recalls. “I can still see it today. I was on a plane from Malta to London and, going to the bathroom and walking down the aisle, I could see people on either side playing Candy Crush. Probably 90% of the plane. I was actually seeing all that revenue myself in real time.”

In 2015, Activision Blizzard began efforts to acquire King for a cost of $5.9bn, representing what, at the time, had been the second largest gaming industry acquisition behind Microsoft’s purchase of Minecraft the year prior. Falzon was entrusted to lead the M&A strategy of King throughout the transaction, gaining notable recognition from those across the industry and even within more casinorelated verticals rather than mobile gaming.

C-level transition: From gaming to gaming

Having the supplier on her resume drew the eyes of various professional onlookers, as Falzon could not only speak to building King’s finance department and preparing its IPO, but also representing an original member from one of the industry’s largest success stories up to that point. Soon after King’s sale to Blizzard Entertainment, Falzon began the search for a new challenge, coming in the form of her first-ever C-level position with Evoke Gaming in June 2016.

As Group CFO, Falzon prepared the M&A process for Evoke Gaming’s eventual sale to Swedish operator Mr Green (itself eventually acquired by William Hill). She was quickly becoming an expert in merger transactions across gaming. The opportunity to become Evoke Gaming’s Group CFO also presented Falzon with her first direct leadership role, using a mixture of valuable lessons taken from early childhood and her professional career to guide her year-plus tenure with the organisation. Falzon shares: “It was a lot of lessons mixed into one, but I give my 100% expecting everyone else to give their 100%. It’s also about treating everyone as a team. This is not about me, my title or my salary, it’s about what we can achieve together. I still adopt the same approach in my role today. There are hierarchies and there are managers, but at the end of the day how can we all achieve a goal together? What is our North Star and how can I help being in the capacity of CEO or CFO? I view it as a successful approach for every business I’ve been in.”

After departing Evoke Gaming in February 2018, Falzon would find herself working in yet another start-up environment with Red Tiger Gaming, earning the familiar role of CFO in April. Falzon had the opportunity to speak with the supplier’s first CEO Gavin Hamilton – somewhat of an industry celebrity today – and could “feel a sense of hunger” within the business, as well as signs Red Tiger Gaming was ready “to do things differently.”

Eye of the tiger

Perhaps due to a “love for working with ambitious people,” she was also determined to replicate the “family feeling” that came with start-up companies and, of course, the long hours it took to generate success. Similar to Falzon’s decision to leave BMW nearly five years prior, joining Red Tiger Gaming was still a leap of faith, but a leap in which Falzon quickly became comfortable – due to a candid approach the supplier took in its early days. “There was a sense of mentorship where it was not always easy getting criticism, but nowadays when I look back, I actually value the criticism because it made me better. It made me who I am today. One of the people I still admire most was Gavin, because we had a lot of difficult conversations and only now have I begun to realise those were actually very good mentoring sessions – which I still use in business today,” Falzon says.

Red Tiger Gaming would continue building an extensive portfolio of popular titles while Falzon served as CFO, gaining the attention of many goliaths across the industry. In September 2019, Red Tiger would be acquired by NetEnt for approximately $280m, putting Falzon’s M&A efforts into the spotlight once again. The merger allowed Red Tiger to expand its reach across gambling and represented the third time Falzon would lead a notable gaming transaction, only six years after first joining the industry with King.
Despite gaining a familiar sense of the challenges and long hours presented, “every deal was different” for Falzon, as well as the people, businesses and problems that followed thereafter. Falzon also dealt with challenges still plaguing the gaming industry today, as being a leading female voice within these negotiations was “never easy,” especially while she attempted to build a name for herself across the financial landscape.

Believing it’s “knowledge that counts” at the end of the day, Falzon does give credence to the significant strides gaming has made with female leadership since she first began taking part in M&A transactions. While C-level titles between men and women “are still not equal” in Falzon’s mind, she went on to state “we have made leaps of improvements and progress” even if “we are not there yet.” Once the sale of Red Tiger to NetEnt was complete, Falzon would remain with the supplier until April 2021, during which time she also served as Group CFO for NetEnt, specifically to assist in its eventual sale to Evolution Gaming Group in June 2020. A $2.1bn all-stock deal in its own right, Falzon 
had now been part of four transactions within the gaming industry and overseen more than $8bn worth of purchase agreements in less than 10 years. NetEnt’s sale to Evolution came with a new set of challenges for Falzon and her associates, however, as the Covid-19 global pandemic brought never-before-seen difficulties.

According to Falzon, NetEnt’s transaction with Evolution was still “more special” than her previous M&A experience because she now found herself handling “two jobs at once.” Tasked with “restructuring the teams and company” as a whole, such efforts represented the first time Falzon was responsible for maintaining a stable financial footing while preparing the company for an acquisition within the same period. Mixing the new responsibilities with a global pandemic certainly made for an enervating period of Falzon’s career, even to the point of taking a break from the day-to-day grind she had become accustomed to since leaving the BMW Group.

Not one to brag...

In March 2021, as the world was returning to a semblance of normalcy, Falzon decided to join Bragg Gaming as a Non-Executive Director and officially concluded her tenure with NetEnt by April of the same year. Attempting to step away from a day-to-day grind could only last so long for Falzon, who was appointed as President and COO of Bragg Gaming just eight months after originally coming on board. “Bragg was important for me because the Non-Executive position was coming on the back of NetEnt’s sale, where I wanted to have a little bit of a break from the day-to-day grind. Obviously that didn’t last long, because as a person I’m very ambitious and didn’t want to be on the retirement stage for a long period of time. I wanted to get back in action,” Falzon says.

“Also, America was a territory I wanted to explore and where I didn’t have any experience at all. It gave me the opportunity to branch off from that pure CFO role and go up the ladder, which would be the President/COO position. I wanted to build the network required to eventually help me make the CEO step.” Falzon was forced to move out of her comfort zone with Bragg, as the President and COO role meant “going out more, being on planes more” and giving up on hiding her face “behind two monitors for 12 hours a day.” Falzon shares: “I had to take that extra step of being this outgoing person to build my network. But besides that, I also appreciated running a business. When I was a CFO, it was, ‘this is bad, this is good, we’re not making money, let’s cut off this deal.’

“Working at Bragg and obviously getting to be more on the commercial side, I started valuing relationships more than numbers and realised you can’t make decisions without involving the relationships formed with your employees. This was probably the biggest lesson I took away while working for the company.” The executive also described how her tenure with Bragg featured more traveling than she had ever experienced in her time spent with previous roles. Although she describes herself as “quite an introvert,” Falzon began spending more time in bars and clubs than she was accustomed to, all while balancing her motherly responsibilities to a three-year-old waiting at home. “From a family point of view, having a daughter and not being constantly home, being on completely different time zones, coming back from jet lag, that was quite an adjustment which had its own expense. There were rewards but, I won’t lie, it wasn’t easy,” Falzon looks back. “I think that’s also where you feel the difference between a man and a woman, where you’re having dinner and the customers want to go to a bar or a club after and even when I really want to go home, you kind of have to say ‘let’s join them.’”

Coming full circle

By the third quarter of 2022 and less than 12 months since Falzon took over as President & COO, Bragg reported record highs in revenue, gross profit and adjusted EBITDA, as well as entered into an agreement with Sega Sammy to distribute iGaming content to operators in the US, UK and other global markets. And yet, despite the success witnessed throughout her tenure with Bragg, getting the opportunity to explore the US rekindled Falzon’s desire for the “start-up mentality.”

Inspired by the chance to once again build something from the ground up, Falzon departed Bragg Gaming in April 2024, taking on her first CEO position with AvatarUX studios. Surrounded by a close-knit group of coworkers, or “family” as Falzon prefers to use, she began to face the difficulties of not only being part of the foundation, but leading the charge of a start-up entity. Even with her CEO title secured, Falzon quickly realised the days of handling responsibilities typically seen by a CFO or COO were far from over.
“At AvatarUX, because it was a small group, you cannot just wear your CEO hat. This is what was different from the other roles, including with Bragg, where if your account manager quits, that means you need to manage until you find a new one. At the same time, I was sitting down and looking at consolidation, so even though my title was CEO, I was constantly wearing different hats,” Falzon explains. “One minute I was an account manager, the second I was a CEO and the third I had to be a CFO. And that’s what I like, because while obviously there’s that hunger, you get to go to the different levels and see more on the product side, what’s working, what’s not, whereas if you are working for much bigger companies, you would have teams doing that for you.” Interestingly, Falzon often finds the CEO role to be “quite lonely,” as there is no hiding behind the days in which positivity is not at the forefront. While never in doubt of her own or her team’s capabilities, it was near impossible for Falzon to not let doubts creep into her mind throughout the early days of her tenure with AvatarUX.

As many of AvatarUX’s early team members joined because of her, Falzon realized she “couldn’t let these people down,” even if building success from a start-up level entity was never “roses and flowers” for the first-time CEO. On the days where Falzon found herself wondering, “maybe I can’t do this,” she was still the first one into the office and the last to leave, with early memories of her father helping fuel the passion of turning AvatarUX into a competitive brand. Helping to also do so was AvatarUX’s presence as a subsidiary of Yolo Group, which gained a quick interest in having Falzon run its B2B division in July 2025. Transitioning from the CEO of AvatarUX to Yolo Group – B2B certainly offered new perspectives for Falzon, but similarities she was becoming well-accustomed to under the Chief Executive position.

The UAE, looking ahead and a "special industry"

On our wider CEO Special theme of the future of European regulation, Falzon explains: “I believe we’ll see a clearer divide between operators and providers chasing short-term growth and those building for long-term sustainability under regulation. With European markets – from Germany and Netherlands to Finland – continuing to tighten frameworks around licensing, advertising, deposit limits, AML and player protection, this shift is cultural, not just operational. Companies accustomed to moving fast will need robust, flexible technology stacks and compliance-first mindsets. In my view, the future of regulation in Europe depends on brands who treat regulation as an advantage, not a constraint – embracing transparency, responsible gaming and long-term stability. Those who resist will increasingly struggle in a market where legality and reputation matter more than ever.”

According to the CEO, though, Yolo Group’s B2B division finds the “biggest opportunity” stems from entering the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where the “initiative will be turning the company into a market leader.” Starting with the UAE in 2026, future expansion is in the cards for Yolo – B2B, especially as the company focuses on offering a “more regulated space” for players to interact with online casino and sportsbook platforms. With over a decade of experience in gaming, Falzon now prepares for her next challenge, but one that can still provide that added sense of family-oriented teamwork and collaboration she’s come to love within the space.

“Being a CEO at Yolo B2B, I would say it’s still a very lonely job where obviously you’re constantly trying to lead everyone yet also restructuring at the same time. Yolo is undergoing a transition where we’re attempting to enter regulated markets, so that means we have to adjust our processes and our mentalities,” Falzon says. “Even though I have much bigger teams than I had at Avatar, it’s still pretty much the same thought process, the same grind you have to endure, so it’s a natural path from being the CEO of AvatarUX to taking over as the CEO of Yolo B2B. It’s the same role at the end of the day, it’s just bigger teams and a bigger company. “What I love about gaming is that it’s fastpaced; no day and no business is the same. I’ve had a lot of roles for a lot of companies and you would think it’s the same job over and over again, but it’s not because you’re dealing with different owners and their different processes. That in itself makes the gaming industry so special.

“Besides that, I saw a big change in the gaming industry from where I started to where I am now. I think before it was the start-up mentality, let’s spend like there’s no tomorrow. It was more of a hobby or project for many owners, but now the gambling industry has turned into a proper business. You need focus, experience and you need to know what you’re doing, otherwise you’re out of this business in no time. This is how it’s shaped me as well, because as a person who’s been in different C-level roles, you need to adapt and be very flexible depending on what circumstance is thrown at you.”

No matter what circumstance may be thrown at Falzon, however, it’s safe to say the light in her office won’t be turned off anytime soon. Just as it has since learning how to fill out VAT statements at 10 years old. With an extra cup of coffee in hand and a laptop charger working to its fullest extent, Falzon prepares to lead Yolo Group – B2B into its next era of gaming expansion, no matter how much overtime it may require.