Betfair, the UK’s biggest online betting company, is proud to announce that it has won its second Queen’s Award for Enterprise in its eight-year history.

The 2008 award comes in the International Trade category, five years after Betfair was recognised in the Innovation category for creating the first successful betting exchange – a new concept that meant a better deal for customers and greater protections within the betting industry.

Since 2003, Betfair has grown substantially from a company with 100,000 users, of which only eight per cent were from outside the UK and Ireland, to a customer base in excess of one million where over 40 per cent are international users.

Winners of the Queen’s Award are selected on the recommendation of the Prime Minister and an independent advisory committee. Betfair joins a select group who have been honoured twice since the inception of the awards in 1966 and it means the company will be able to carry the Queen’s Award emblem for another five years.

Since winning its first Queen’s award in 2003, Betfair has grown from 200 employees to over 1200 people in 2008, spread across its bases in Hammersmith, Stevenage, Malta and Australia. Driven by cutting-edge technology, Betfair enables customers to choose their own odds, even after an event has started. Betfair processes five million transactions a day, more than all of the European stock exchanges combined. Over half of all new customers now come from outside the UK and Ireland.

In addition to the exchange, Betfair now has an established games portfolio. Betfair Poker, Betfair Games, Betfair Casino and Betfair’s accumulator products are hosted from Malta. It is an area that has seen significant growth and investment. The company is also developing new revenue streams by providing automated price feeds to third parties, establishing white-label exchanges and through its own Betfair Mobile product.

In 2007, Betfair launched a new company, Tradefair, for those wishing to bet on financial markets. Betfair is a licensed betting operator in the UK, and also operates under licences in Australia, Austria, Italy and Malta. The company is seeking licences elsewhere within the European Union and further afield. Betfair welcomes regulation and is committed to paying the appropriate product fees in every market in which it operates.