Leading games aggregator Alea implements strict ‘reverse integration’ to ease compliance
- Gambling IQ
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Drawing on the founders’ 15-year business partnership, Alea is now intensifying its focus on millisecond
latency, ‘reverse integration’ onboarding and enhanced studio security
After 15 years working side by side, Charlotte Lecomte and Alex Tomic have turned their long-standing partnership into Alea’s defining strength. Their games-aggregation business is no longer pitching itself as just another content catalogue, but as a core piece of gaming infrastructure; built for speed, resilience, and complete transparency in the eyes of both operators and regulators.
The shift is not new. Alea moved from consumer-facing operations into B2B aggregation several years ago, but it has now launched a renewed push to differentiate on technical performance and governance. Every millisecond matters; a guiding principle for Alea’s platform, where a single integration unlocks a catalogue of more than 16,000 games from 160 providers, supported by agile portfolio management and engagement tools.
“Speed is a currency in our business,” Alea co-founder Charlotte Lecomte told GamblingIQ magazine. “Players notice when a game stutters; operators notice when session states slip. Our job is to make both vanish.”
Low latency, in this context, is more than a marketing phrase. Aggregators operate between studios that create games and operators that host them; every additional integration and data hop can introduce delay and complexity. Alea’s architecture aims to centralise validation, reconciliation and event handling, providing operators with a single integration point intended to preserve gameplay continuity and financial accuracy even under load. For operators scaling across multiple regulated markets, that reduced operational complexity can translate into faster launches, fewer incidents and a more predictable player experience.
But low latency and high throughput are only one pillar of Alea’s message. The company is also emphasising what it calls “reverse integration”, an onboarding model that requires game studios to meet a prescribed set of technical and operational standards before connection. Under that model, token-based safeguards, retry and rollback mechanisms, and detailed reconciliation hooks must be implemented by studios as a precondition for going live on the platform.
The practical effect is to shift much of the integration and compliance work upstream. Rather than operators building bespoke connectors and ad-hoc fixes for each provider, Alea enforces a uniform standard across its supply chain. “That standardisation can simplify audit processes and incident responses for operators and their compliance teams, particularly in jurisdictions where regulators expect demonstrable supply-chain controls and clear forensic records,” Lecomte says.
Pictured in GamblingIQ magazine with Alea CEO Jordi Sendra, Charlotte Lecomte discusses the ‘low-latency advantage’ and explains how Alea’s architecture centralises validation, reconciliation and event handling, giving operators a single integration point designed to preserve gameplay continuity and financial accuracy under load
Verification remains a key concern for buyers. Millisecond performance under normal conditions does not necessarily equate to resilience under peak traffic or in failure scenarios. Operators and auditors will seek independent stress tests, transparent performance dashboards and contractual service-level commitments before placing mission-critical integrations with a single aggregator. Reconciliation fidelity — the guarantee that ledgers remain in sync across operator, aggregator and studio under stress — will be closely examined.
The regulatory angle is important. As European markets tighten oversight of online gambling supply chains, a standardised approach to integration and incident logging can simplify compliance work and speed responses to regulators’ inquiries. Alea’s model, by centralising and documenting reconciliation and rollback procedures, is framed as a means to meet those expectations. Whether regulators view such centralisation as strengthening or concentrating operational risk will depend on evidence produced in audits and any incidents that arise.
For now, Alea’s strategy amounts to a bet on discipline and demonstrable engineering. The long professional relationship between Lecomte and Tomic is deployed in company narratives as evidence of continuity in leadership and product thinking — a way of assuring customers that technical promises will be matched by operational follow-through.
What happens next is likely to hinge on three tests: independent proof of performance at scale; industry willingness among studios to accept a higher technical entry threshold; and regulators’ appraisal of whether a centralised aggregator improves or concentrates systemic risk. If Alea can go global in satisfying those tests, it may very well entrench a model of aggregation sold primarily as infrastructure. If it cannot, operators will continue to split their approach between strict, compliance-led aggregators and looser, content-first providers.
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