LEXINGTON, Ky. -- AmWager, a small Kentucky-based account-wagering company, has launched two new options for its customers that were developed by the British betting company Colossus, including a feature allowing players to cash-out of multi-leg wagers on overseas races prior to all the races in the series being run. AmWager is the first U.S. company to offer the cash-out option, a feature of betting pools in Britain, Ireland, and elsewhere for several years. AmWager customers will be limited to using the cash-out option on multi-leg pools administered by Colossus in Britain and Ireland, though officials for the company and other U.S. betting operators are attempting to sort through the myriad issues posed by current U.S. regulations that would allow for the option in domestic pools. “We think this is going to be a very popular feature going forward, and we look forward to extending that capability to U.S. pools,” said Nelson Clemmens, the founder and chief executive of the company, on Wednesday. The cash-out option will be offered on approximately 30 pools a week hosted by Colossus for races at British and Irish tracks, ranging from pick 3s to pick 6s. The cash-out option will be available after a single race is declared official in any of the multi-leg bets, according to Jason Martin, AmWager’s Informational Technology Director. The wagers usually have a minimum denomination of 20 cents. Under the cash-out option, players can sell all or part of a multi-leg bet back to Colossus, which uses a proprietary tool to analyze all the tickets that are still live in multi-leg bets to determine the amount the company will pay to buy a portion of each individual ticket. The option has proved popular in other jurisdictions where it is available. AmWager is a relatively small player in the account-wagering market, with handle in 2018 of $38.7 million through its Oregon hub, according to records of the Oregon Racing Commission. That figure is dwarfed by the $1.8 billion wagered through Churchill Downs’s Twinspires.com in 2018, the market leader, and well below the annual handle of the other leaders in the market, TVG and XpressBet (DRF’s own account-wagering operation is administered by XpressBet). But the addition of the options to AmWager’s betting menu could prove to be an attractive feature to some horseplayers, according to Clemmens. AmWager has been willing to take risks in the past – last year it became the first account-wagering company to allow deposits with Bitcoin, the highly speculative cryptocurrency. “It’s potentially a very useful tool,” Clemmens said, referring to the cash-out option. “This gives the retail, mid-level player an option to incentivize them.” The limiting factor for the popularity of the option will be the narrow ability of players to use it only on multi-leg bets comprising foreign races. Most U.S. players are not well versed in overseas racing, in large part because of limited past-performance information on horses racing there, at least when compared to the products available in the U.S. The five-hour time difference between the UK and the Eastern time zone of the U.S. is also a hurdle. The other option added earlier this week to AmWager’s menu – the company described the debut of the options as a “soft launch” – was the ability for customers to put together multi-leg wagers and then offer a portion of the bets to other AmWager customers, under a heading called “Syndicates.” The option is also run by Colossus. Under that option, the player can designate any portion of the bet for investment by other customers. The syndicate “captain” retains all control over whether to cash-out the bet, although other investors can use social media to influence the decision. While both options have been available in the United Kingdom for several years, current U.S. regulations would need to be changed to allow the options on pools hosted by U.S. tracks. Sean Pinsonneault, the North American representative for Colossus who is a former betting official for Woodbine in Canada, acknowledged that those regulations may prove to be difficult hurdles to overcome, but he said that the company is working with a number of betting companies and racetracks to ease a way forward. “It’s going to take some time,” he said.