Betfair’s Breon Corcoran “Business Person of the Year”

Betfair’s Breon Corcoran “Business Person of the Year”

Just a few short days ago the UK broadsheet newspaper; the Sunday Times, named the annual recipient of it’s annual Business Person of the Year award. But the winner was not the CEO of the world’s biggest commodities trading companies (as in 2012- Ivan Glasenburg), or the Chief Executive of the Royal Mail or supermarket giant Tesco (a la 2013 and 2010 respectively). This year, the Business Person of the Year was named as Betfair’s Chief Executive, Breon Corcoran.

Breon Corcoran joined Betfair from Paddy Power in 2012, and has been pivotal in the orchestration of the merger between the two- just one of the reasons he was earmarked for the award. In the special feature which ran in the Sunday Times on the 27th December, Corcoran was praised for steering Betfair from its  post IPO decline back in 2011 to its current position as a leading enterprise in the UK. And when the long-awaited £1billion+ Betfair/Paddy Power merger completes in the coming month? Corcoran will take the place of CEO at the helm of the newly formed company.

There is no doubt in our minds, however, that while Corcoran will be pleased to receive this title from the Sunday Times, he is recompensed heartily for his efforts. News reports place the married father of three’s annual salary from Betfair at £528,000 a year, with a bonus given this year of just shy of a million. Upon joining the company he was also promised a ‘Golden Hello’; a package of shares worth £10 million, and this too was paid out this year.

Large as these payments may be, Betfair seem more than happy to pay up. Their share value increased from £750million in 2012 to £2.3billion in July of 2015, along with a boost to their visitor numbers- a 250% increase in UK customers over the same period. In addition to this, Corcoran has led a shift in the company’s focus, leading to a smaller number of customers from countries where online gambling is frowned upon by regulators (just 18% of their revenue now comes from what they dub “unsustainable markets”)- something that can only be considered a positive change.