Tengco Said Rules Must Evolve, He Also Said PAGCOR Should Stay Predictable

Signal Spotlight · Philippine iGaming, regulatory posture

What happened

PAGCOR chairman and CEO Alejandro Tengco delivered a keynote address at The Regulators Forum, a joint initiative between PAGCOR and Inside Asian Gaming, held at Newport World Resorts in Pasay City on September 17, 2026, as reported by GGRAsia, Panay News, and SoloAzar. "Our regulatory framework will continue to evolve as conditions change and as our experience gives us a better understanding of what works and where improvements are needed," Tengco said. "What matters is that we remain open to corrections, that we are willing to learn, and that we are prepared to act when change is necessary."

In the same address, Tengco explicitly paired that evolution language with a stated commitment to stability, saying an effective regulatory system should safeguard the sector's integrity while giving legitimate operators a "stable and predictable" regulatory environment. He also cited PAGCOR's proposed separation of its regulatory and commercial functions as part of the same institutional reform, describing it as a move "to ensure that all legitimate operators compete on a level playing field while the public can have confidence in the integrity of the system."

Why it matters

The one-sided version of this story, evolution language taken alone, supports a narrative that PAGCOR is signaling permanent regulatory instability, that compliance teams should abandon static rule-mapping in favor of continuous horizon-scanning because no current ruleset can be trusted to hold. That's not what Tengco actually described. He explicitly balanced the evolution commitment against a stated stability commitment in the same breath, describing a regulator trying to be both responsive to real-world conditions and dependable for the operators working under it. That's a more deliberate, more specific positioning act than "expect constant change," and treating it as the latter overstates what was actually said.

The real context worth weighing is what's happening around this statement, not just the statement's own wording. This is the same week PAGCOR confirmed the Minimum Guaranteed Fee is being actively used as the mechanism to exit underperforming online licensees, and the commercial-regulatory decoupling decision is reportedly nearing completion, with GCG review expected to conclude soon. Tengco tied this specific speech directly to that decoupling process, treating both as part of one coherent institutional reform. Read together, PAGCOR is genuinely signaling assertiveness, on decoupling, on license enforcement, on institutional reform generally, but that assertiveness is being paired deliberately with a stability message, not substituted for one. Operators reading only the evolution language risk overcorrecting toward treating every existing rule as provisional, when the concrete, trackable events are specifically the decoupling timeline and the MGF enforcement pattern, not a generalized expectation of shifting rules across the board.

What to watch

The commercial-regulatory decoupling timeline specifically. GCG's review is reportedly nearing a decision. Once it forwards a recommendation to the Office of the President, an executive order would follow if approved, that's the concrete structural event this speech was building toward, not the evolution language on its own.