In Touch Games casinos

In Touch Games Limited Information

Who are In Touch Games?

It’s increasingly common for iGaming and casino network companies that appear to be UK-based to actually not be. For tax reasons, practicality reasons and a hundred other reasons to go with them, plenty of iGaming companies have long since abandoned the UK – from an operational point of view – to set up head offices in Gibraltar, Malta, or somewhere else in Europe. In Touch Games Limited has never gone down that route. This is a company which is proud to be British and has its head office in Birmingham. It hasn’t always been in Birmingham, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.

If you know In Touch Games Limited, you’ll know that this is a mobile-lead iGaming company that operates some of the most unique and original casino sites that players in the UK have access to. None of the casinos it operates are especially big when it comes to the number of games they have available, but the exclusive nature of all the games on them means that they’re memorable. We’ve provided overviews of the top five In Touch Games Limited casinos further down this page, but for now, let’s look back over the operator’s history.

The History of In Touch Games Limited

In Touch Games Limited was founded in Halesowen in 2001 by Simon Wilson and Emil Nestor. The founders of the firm remain in charge as directors to this day. The original version of the company had no interest in making casino games or casino websites, though; instead, it made “leisure machines.” That’s a woolly way of saying that In Touch made pub quiz machines and slots cabinets, all of which could be played with a touchscreen – hence the name. In keeping with the idea of making machines that could stand in pubs and bars, the company came up with the “Sound Storm” digital MP3 jukebox in 2006. The jukebox unit would go on to become the default choice of big-name pub chains like Marstons for several years.

Everything changed for In Touch Games in 2007 when the company came up with its first-ever online casino. That casino site was mFortune, which remains the flagship brand of the casino network today. The first version of the mFortune website was shown off for the first time to attendees of the ICE exhibition in Earl’s Court, London, with just four games to its name; a single slots game, a poker game, a blackjack game and a roulette game. From these humble beginnings, a whole online casino empire would soon spring. Those in charge of In Touch Games must have known they were onto a winner with mFortune immediately, as the company also opened new offices in Romania during the same year. From the moment mFortune went live, the operator never looked back.

Bring on the Brands

No matter how good the four brands mFortune was launched with were, the lack of options hurt the casino’s appeal. As such, In Touch Games spent the next couple of years adding new gaming options to the site, including the original Pirate’s Treasure slot, bingo games, and a steady stream of original slots games developed in-house by the company. By 2010, In Touch Games felt like it had a decent grip on how the world of online casinos worked, so it decided it was time to give mFortune a sister site. The second casino to launch under the In Touch Games umbrella was PocketWin.

By now, the company was beginning to attract attention within the industry. In Touch Games picked up a “Product of the Year” award from the EGR Operator Awards in 2012 and picked up “Best Bingo Operator” and “Best Poker Operator” that same year at the mGaming (Mobile Gaming) awards. Inspired by its own success, In Touch Game made multiple hires, bringing in graphic designers, a marketing team, and other new departments designed to take the company to the next level. By the end of 2015, there were eighty people directly employed by In Touch, and the company had to move to larger, newer offices in Halesowen in 2016 to accommodate its ever-growing family.

Hard Times for In Touch Gaming

As 2016 gave way to 2017, things were still going well for In Touch Games. Mr Spin, the operator’s third brand, went live at the end of 2016. The fourth brand, Dr Slot, was added in 2018. By this point, the company’s workforce had swollen to 300 people. 2019 saw the launch of Cashmo Casino and the appropriately-named Casino 2020, which turned out to be a surprise hit and one of the most popular casino sites of the following year across the UK. Put simply, save for the obvious horrors of 2020, things couldn’t have been going any better for the business. When it launched Bonus Boss as brand number seven that year, it must have thought the good times would last forever.

Sadly, this wasn’t to be. Jammy Monkey, launched in 2021, is the last new casino site the company has launched to date – and those shiny new offices in Halesowen are now closed. Recent years have seen the operator get in trouble with the UK Gambling Commission more than once (further information about that is available below), and then 2022 saw the entire company sold to Skywind Holdings – another iGaming company based in the Isle of Man. Whether the sale would have been necessary had the problems with the UKGC not arisen is something we’ll never know, but when Skywind took ownership of the company in June of that year, it decided to make changes.

The biggest change that Skywind made to its newly-acquired asset was to shift it from Halesowen to a new address in Birmingham. The move came with redundancies, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. Fifty employees at the In Touch Gaming office in Halesowen were laid off just before Christmas, and the lack of warning plus the poor timing meant that In Touch Games Limited found its name in national newspapers for all the wrong reasons. From the heady heights of sponsoring the shirts of West Bromwich Albion in the Premier League a few years earlier, In Touch Games suddenly found itself public enemy number one on its home turf. The company’s reputation is yet to recover.

In Touch Gaming Limited and the UKGC

The good news regarding In Touch Gaming and its licensing status is that it has a full UK Gambling Commission licence under account number 2091. That means that when players play at In Touch Games casinos, they do so with all the protections that such a licence entails. The bad news is that the licence isn’t exactly what you’d call clean, and some of the issues identified in the past by the UKGC have been serious.

In March 2021, In Touch Games Limited was fined £3.4m, issued with a formal warning and had additional conditions attached to its operating licence after the UKGC undertook a regulatory review of its operations and found multiple licence breaches. The failures related to fair and transparent practices, anti-money laundering, customer interaction, marketing, and combating problem gambling. At the time, the Commission noted that In Touch Games cooperated fully with the Commission throughout the whole process. That ought to have been a wake-up call for the company, but if it was, the company soon forgot the lessons it had learned.

In January 2023, In Touch Games was handed a further financial penalty of £6.13m after multiple further failures were identified in relation to interacting with customers and preventing money laundering. Again, the Commission said that In Touch Games had taken “immediate remedial action” upon being notified of the failings. It’s to be hoped that the lesson truly has sunk in this time, as nearly £10m in fines in three years is both a bad look for the company and a heavy burden for a business of this size to deal with.