Aristocrat names former Entain COO Dafne Guisard as CEO (elect), Trevor Croker to retire in April 2027
Aristocrat Leisure has announced that CEO and Managing Director Trevor Croker will retire in April 2027. Chief Commercial Officer, EMEA, Dafne Guisard has been named as his successor, subject to any necessary regulatory pre-approvals.
Guisard joined Aristocrat in February 2026 and leads the group’s global social casino business Product Madness, which generated more than US$1 billion in revenue in FY25.
Prior to joining Aristocrat, Guisard served as Chief Operations Officer at Entain, leading more than 2,500 people across operations in over 30 regulated markets. She has also held senior roles at The Kraft Heinz Company and AB InBev.
“I am deeply honored to be chosen to lead this great business as CEO, and am excited at the opportunities ahead,” highlighted Guisard.
Guisard will relocate from London to Las Vegas for the role, while Croker will remain with the company to support her for 12 months from the announcement.
By the time he retires, Croker will have served more than a decade as CEO and 18 years in senior leadership at Aristocrat, with the company’s market cap growing fourfold to almost $40 billion during his time as CEO.
“It has been a privilege to lead Aristocrat through a decade of significant change and opportunity,” said Croker.
“Dafne is an outstanding executive who will bring highly relevant and complementary perspectives to the CEO role,” he furthered.
Chairman Neil Chatfield added that “the Board considers Dafne the ideal choice to succeed Trevor.”
The appointment comes as Aristocrat continues to expand its online real money gaming presence, following its acquisition of Awager and the online North American debut of Lightning Link.
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The Backstory
A succession shaped by digital expansion
Aristocrat’s decision to name Dafne Guisard as CEO-elect places an executive with deep regulated-market experience at the center of a company whose growth agenda has increasingly shifted beyond its traditional land-based slot machine base. The planned transition from Trevor Croker, who will retire in April 2027, comes after a decade in which Aristocrat expanded its market value, broadened its technology holdings and pushed harder into online real-money gaming.
The appointment also signals continuity rather than a reset. Croker will remain with the company for 12 months after the announcement to support the transition, giving Aristocrat time to manage regulatory approvals and investor expectations while it continues to build its interactive operations. Guisard’s background at Entain, where she oversaw operations across more than 30 regulated markets, aligns closely with the compliance-heavy environment Aristocrat is targeting. Her current remit overseeing Product Madness, the group’s global social casino business, also gives her direct exposure to digital consumer products at scale.
That mix matters because Aristocrat’s next phase depends on converting well-known casino content, lottery technology and platform assets into recurring digital revenue. The company has spent the past several years assembling the infrastructure to do that. The leadership change therefore arrives as execution, not acquisition alone, becomes the key test.
NeoGames deal created the platform base
The biggest strategic turn came with Aristocrat’s acquisition of NeoGames in April 2024, a transaction that gave the company proprietary ilottery, igaming and online sports betting technology. The deal added NeoGames, Aspire Global, BtoBet and Pariplay to the group and became the foundation for what is now Aristocrat Interactive.
That acquisition was meant to accelerate Aristocrat’s move from content supplier to end-to-end digital partner. In Ontario, the company used that broader stack to support the launch of Betiton through its white-label platform, a deal that showed how the NeoGames assets could be deployed in regulated igaming markets. The launch, described in Aristocrat Interactive’s expansion into Ontario with Betiton, underscored the supplier’s ambition to provide technology, managed services, CRM tools and exclusive content rather than games alone.
The NeoGames acquisition also gave Aristocrat a stronger position in ilottery, an area with long contract cycles and public-sector customers. That makes it strategically different from the more volatile online casino business. Lottery contracts can deepen customer relationships, produce steady service revenue and help establish the company as a trusted operator in highly scrutinized markets. For a future CEO, that portfolio mix could provide a buffer as Aristocrat pursues higher-growth digital opportunities.
Interactive leadership moved from integration to growth
Aristocrat’s digital push has already required significant leadership changes below the group CEO level. Moti Malul, who came into Aristocrat through NeoGames, led the early phase of integration after the acquisition. He was later succeeded by Dylan Slaney, a former Light & Wonder igaming executive, in a move covered in Aristocrat Interactive’s leadership transition from Moti Malul to Dylan Slaney.
The change marked a shift in emphasis. Malul’s role was largely to help combine acquired businesses and establish a unified interactive division. Slaney’s mandate has been more commercial: turn the enlarged platform into revenue growth, particularly by bringing Aristocrat’s strongest land-based brands to mobile and online channels.
In a later interview, Slaney described the opportunity as unlocking Aristocrat’s “treasure trove” of intellectual property. The strategy, detailed in Dylan Slaney’s plan to unlock Aristocrat Interactive’s content portfolio, centers on taking major slot franchises such as Lightning Link and Dragon Link into online formats. The rationale is straightforward: Aristocrat has brands with established recognition on casino floors, but many have not yet been fully monetized on mobile devices.
For Guisard, that creates both an advantage and a challenge. The company already owns the content and distribution capabilities needed for a more aggressive online strategy. But the business must prove it can execute across multiple regulated markets, manage compliance and deliver digital products that meet player expectations without diluting brands built in land-based casinos.
Lottery wins show the value of scale
Recent lottery contracts illustrate why Aristocrat has placed so much emphasis on building a full-service interactive division. In Michigan, the company signed a six-year agreement to provide ilottery products under the NeoGames US brand beginning in July 2026. The deal, outlined in Aristocrat Interactive’s Michigan Lottery contract, extends a relationship that began with NeoGames’ platform in 2014.
The Michigan arrangement includes eInstant games, draw-based games, player account management, business intelligence tools, CRM marketing, compliance support, payments management and responsible gameplay services. That breadth is important because it demonstrates the commercial logic behind Aristocrat’s acquisition strategy. Rather than selling discrete products, the company can embed itself across a lottery’s digital operations.
Massachusetts provided another proof point. Aristocrat Interactive launched a full turnkey ilottery solution for the Massachusetts State Lottery Commission, including exclusive games from Aristocrat’s IP library, more than 20 eInstant games from NeoGames Studio, draw-based games and managed services. The rollout, described in Aristocrat Interactive’s launch of lottery games in Massachusetts, also made Massachusetts players the first to access an eInstant featuring Timber Wolf, a familiar Aristocrat land-based title.
Those lottery wins carry broader stakes. They give Aristocrat recurring relationships with public agencies, showcase its ability to deploy technology in regulated environments and create channels for its content library. They also make reliability and responsible gameplay central to the company’s growth story, areas likely to remain under close scrutiny as online gambling expands.
Why the CEO handoff matters now
Croker’s tenure leaves Guisard with a company that is larger, more global and more digitally complex than the Aristocrat he inherited. Its land-based gaming business remains a core profit engine, but the next wave of investor attention is likely to focus on whether Aristocrat Interactive can justify the capital committed to acquisitions and product development.
The CEO-elect will inherit a business with multiple moving parts: social casino through Product Madness, land-based gaming, ilottery, igaming platforms, content aggregation and emerging online real-money gaming initiatives. Her experience at Entain is relevant because the operator side of the industry demands rigorous market-by-market execution. Aristocrat’s opportunity is to bring that discipline to a supplier model that now spans technology, content and services.
The timing is also sensitive. Slaney has pointed to 2026 as a year when investments in Aristocrat Interactive should begin paying off more visibly. Lightning Link’s move to mobile, broader deployment of major slot franchises and continued expansion in North America and Europe will all shape perceptions of whether Aristocrat can translate its casino-floor dominance into digital leadership.
Guisard’s appointment therefore frames Aristocrat’s next chapter as an execution story. The company has assembled assets that reach across the online gambling value chain. Its task now is to integrate them into a coherent growth engine while preserving the strength of its legacy business. The leadership transition gives Aristocrat a long runway to manage that shift, but it also raises the bar for measurable digital returns before Croker exits in 2027.
