Industry’s travails may be behind Corcoran’s decision to call time

The likelihood of increased regulation in the gambling world probably weighed on the departing chief executive’s decision to leave

The past year has been an unhappy one for Paddy Power Betfair. Now it’s losing its chief executive, Breon Corcoran, a technology specialist with a passion for big data analytics.

Looking at the merged PP Betfair Group over which he has presided as chief executive for the past two years, the vista ahead isn’t anything as promising, as remunerative or as exciting as in times past.

The problems, in truth, are industry-wide. This ...