Challenges to Sports Betting Technology

For every betting operator, the Football World Cup is the most important and therefore more testing sporting event. It is the event that stretches every operational, technological and marketing function to the limit. It is the period of time when competition intensifies, piling pressure on acquisition and retention strategies, marketing spending and product competitiveness and differentiation. It is also the event that maximizes the potential client base, being the single event with the widest global appeal. At the same time, betting turnover is skyrocketing, increasing the importance of live betting, extensive market propositions, but also risk and profitability management.

This time of increased expectations acts as a magnifying glass for the current generation of sports betting solutions and technology, while at the same time highlighting the key requirements for the next generation of sports betting platforms. Currently, betting operators have grown accustomed to making several compromises regarding what they can expect from their betting platform. Especially compared to other gaming market verticals, the standards for betting platforms seem to have dropped somewhat in recent years, as the current generation of platforms has failed to keep up with several developments, such as:

• The evolution of the Internet and the web to more engaging, user-driven and social experiences

• The new competitive environment introduced by regulation of online gaming in European countries (e.g. Italy)

• The need for synergies between –and even convergence of– the interactive and traditional retail sales channels

• The emergence of mobile appliances as an omnipresent everyday data communication tool

• The need for dynamic, exciting –and even user generated– content to accompany the core betting product offering

• The increased size of the B2B market in the newly regulated jurisdictions

Despite these developments, today many operators find themselves supported by apparent market-leading platforms that are based on dated technological elements, obsolete architectures and address several requirements in a rather suboptimal manner. What’s more, customization or modification work, frequently required due to the more dynamic nature of the new markets, seems to incur an ever-increasing cost, frequently disproportionate to the requirement.

Betting technology has been slow to take the, necessary, next evolution step and move to the “next generation” of platforms. These should also address the needs for:

• Powerful management of all offered content, both product-specific but also side-offerings like information and entertainment content, social betting options, and adoption of Web 2.0/3.0 paradigms in how they apply to online betting products.

• Fast integration of third-party content, including all standard industry feeds regarding betting, but also local feeds wherever these are required, and also news content relevant to the product propositions.

• Powerful product and market management, allowing great flexibility to the operator to strike the right balance between margin optimization, risk minimization, product and market diversity and automated or semi-automated operational tasks.

• Full or partial automation of operations relevant to selected sports, events, markets, including risk management, without affecting the bottom line. This is obviously applicable for any such elements of overall lesser importance to the operator (as the case may be, for exotic or unpopular sports etc.) that may be deemed to increase product diversity and therefore appeal.

• Flexibility with regard to supporting any type of operational organization the operator may choose to deploy or already has in place. This can range from a fully centralized operation of multiple brands, sports books or countries, to a fully distributed model and anything in between.

It has been a long-standing industry wish to operate with one single betting platform for both the internet and retail channels; most operators currently need to either deploy and integrate two separate platforms for supporting both channels or run the two channels in an arrangement favoring the one over the other (e.g. as master-slave). A single organization with a single operational structure in support of betting should only have to use a single platform supporting all these operations without any shortcuts or compromises.

INTRALOT, being the world’s leading sports book operator, managing bets in excess of $6 Billion, has been very successful in addressing all challenges mentioned above through a combination of in-house solutions founded on either technology or business process excellence. All these solutions form the basis of the new proposition by INTRALOT Interactive, bringing forward the next generation of sports betting solutions.

George Zenzefilis, General Director of INTRALOT Interactive