From Wall Street to the Lottery Boardroom: How Amy Howe and Stéphane Pallez Built Betting Giants
Not every woman who ends up running a lottery or betting empire comes from inside the industry. Amy Howe spent 15 years in consulting and ticketing before turning FanDuel into America’s biggest sportsbook, while Stéphane Pallez spent decades in French public finance before taking charge of her country’s national lottery. Their backgrounds couldn’t be more different, but both ended up doing the same thing: proving that leading a gambling or lottery company doesn’t require having grown up inside one. At Leiden & Leuven Magazine, we like stories like these because they show that the path to the top rarely looks the way people expect.
Amy Howe: Turning FanDuel Into America’s Biggest Sportsbook
Before she ever set foot in the betting industry, Amy Howe spent years as a partner at McKinsey & Company and later ran global operations at Ticketmaster, where she doubled the company’s ticketing revenue and modernized its platform. She joined FanDuel Group in 2021 as president and was named permanent CEO later that year, becoming, at the time, the only woman running a major US sports betting company. Under her leadership, FanDuel captured roughly half of the entire US online sports betting market, delivered the industry’s first full year of profitability for a mobile operator, and was repeatedly named Sportsbook of the Year at the Global Gaming Awards. Howe also used her position to push the industry toward more responsible growth, publicly questioning how much money gambling companies spend chasing new customers, and built out FanDuel’s first formal diversity and women’s leadership programs before stepping away from the role in 2026 after five years at the helm a run that reshaped what a modern US sportsbook could look like.
Stéphane Pallez: The Woman Running France’s National Lottery
Stéphane Pallez’s career started nowhere near a casino floor. A graduate of Sciences Po and France’s elite ENA, she spent two decades at the French Treasury before becoming deputy CFO of Orange and then CEO of the state reinsurance group CCR. In 2014, she was named Chairwoman and CEO of La Française des Jeux France’s national lottery operator and has held the role ever since, being re-elected by shareholders as recently as 2024. Pallez led FDJ’s privatization and stock market listing in 2019, tripled its online revenue, and in 2024 oversaw the roughly €2.5 billion acquisition of European gambling group Kindred, rebranding the combined company as FDJ United. Few executives anywhere in Europe have held a lottery company’s top job for over a decade while also taking it public and doubling its size through acquisition.
From Ticketing to Treasury: Two Very Different Roads to the Top
What Amy Howe did for FanDuel building it into the dominant name in US sports betting Stéphane Pallez has done for FDJ United, turning France’s once purely domestic lottery operator into a diversified, publicly traded European gambling group with lottery, sports betting, and online gaming all under one roof. Neither woman set out to work in gambling. Howe was fixing ticketing systems; Pallez was managing sovereign debt strategy at the French Treasury. Both simply turned out to be extremely good at running large, complex, regulated businesses and the betting and lottery industry, hungry for exactly that kind of discipline, was happy to hand them the keys.
At Leiden & Leuven Magazine, we keep circling back to executives like Amy Howe and Stéphane Pallez because their careers make the same point from two different continents: the skills that build a great leader discipline, financial rigor, the ability to manage complexity under public scrutiny transfer across industries far more easily than people assume. Neither woman waited for a role in gambling to find her; both built careers strong enough that the industry eventually came looking for them.