Category: Events

Sports betting innovation stifled by short-term focus

Innovation in sports betting is being gradually hindered by a short-term outlook on financial results, industry experts have acknowledged.

A selection of executives from across the sector offered insights on the latest SBC Webinar, led by Algosport, titled ‘Sports betting needs help – what lessons are sportsbooks failing to learn when it comes to innovation?’.

“As an industry, we’ve become quite risk-averse,” explained Algosports’ Managing Director, Marc Thomas. “A lot of tier one operators and suppliers are now publicly listed companies, and those publicly listed companies need to have a profit every quarter if not every month.”

“What that does is restrict the innovation curve because people are just thinking, what can I do to either keep my business the same or grow at a smaller rate with a reduced amount of risk? What they aren’t thinking about is what is the next big thing that we’re going to do that is going to come to fruition in 12-18 months.

“If you look at some of the innovations that have been within sports betting, such as bet builders and same-game multis, that’s been driven by tier one operators who ultimately took a gamble on a product and said, this product isn’t going to drive us any revenue for the next 12 months so I’m going to put [lots] of marketing dollars behind it and eventually it will cut through.”

Responding to this point, the Head of Sportsbook Product at Novibet, Giannis Paraschos, noted the conflict that operators face when allocating resources.

He said: “We rely heavily on our proprietary platform, so we develop most of the things ourselves.

“This means that resources are scarce. So even if you have a visionary plan and nice ideas, then you have to prioritise. The most challenging thing is trying to balance the brand’s needs in order to be successful.

“They say you have to put 10% of your efforts into innovation, but this can’t always be the case because most of the time you have to deliver something that is valuable to the company now compared to something that will eventually be valuable.”

Innovation in sports betting is often driven by smaller developers, such as Algosport. However, it can often be hard for developers to transition the idea they have into practice, either through their own product or through an integration with a larger operator.

Jamie Hart, Head of Gambling at Conquer Technology, discussed some of the challenges developers face.

He said: “The problem I think the industry has is that we’ve got a lot of these tiny pockets of innovatory thinkers but it costs you so much to come to market as a B2C that you can’t justify starting a whole business based on that one idea.

“And then if you’ve got something that’s great, it’s very hard to get into somebody’s roadmap to integrate something that’s only one part of somebody’s business. And then quite often, they’ll take a look at it and go, we may as well build it ourselves because it doesn’t look that hard but then we’ve got fit it into our roadmap that is backed up to 2026.”

Hart also recalled his time working at William Hill, where innovation was “split off into a separate area” and provided a budget to experiment and develop “a lot of groundbreaking things”.

He explained that this was able to happen as the CEO at the time was someone who understood sports betting, whereas now a lot of the publicly listed companies in the vertical are “run by people that aren’t confident they know how the whole business works”.

Also on the agenda during the wide-ranging discussion were the differences in innovation between Europe and the US post-PASPA, particularly focusing on innovation driven by  industry leaders in North America like FanDuel and DraftKings.

You can watch the full webinar by clicking here.

 

Content and images sourced from  SBC News. All rights reserved by the original publisher.

SBC Webinars & Algosport | Sports betting needs help – what lessons are sportsbooks failing to learn when it comes to innovation?

Tomorrow, Thursday, September 19th and airing live at 14:00 BST, SBC Webinars is joined by Algosport for a session analysing the current state of sports betting innovation in Europe, and a frank discussion on the ‘slower and less exciting’ developments in iGaming and technology when compared to the North American counterparts.

In this live webinar, which features a strong lineup from throughout the industry, they will examine the underlying reasons for the lack of inspiring developments, pick out new and innovative products that could make a difference in 2024 and beyond, as well as highlight immediate improvements that sportsbook operators and suppliers could be making right now to ‘plug the gaps’ with existing products.

Featuring:

🎙John Paraschos, Head of Sportsbook Product, Novibet

🎙William Woodhams, CEO, Fitzdares

🎙Jamie Hart, Head of Gambling, Conquer Technology

🎙Marc Thomas, Managing Director, Algosport

📚 Session Moderator: Scott Longley, Content and Editorial Consultant, Clear Concise Media

You can sign up for this session via the link below, this will also give you unlimited access to the full video session, once the recording is complete.

Register for tomorrow’s webinar!

 

Content and images sourced from  SBC News. All rights reserved by the original publisher.

SBC Webinars: Third-party providers as drivers of innovation

Technological innovation can sometimes end up in stalemate when it comes to sports betting products – something contrary to the constant push by operators to bring the lever higher with trading solutions so that they can acquire a new breed of sports betting end users.

Brands often decide that the best approach going forward is to develop their offerings in-house, but this could bring a number of hurdles along with it. This is where third-party providers can swoop in and help operators get back on the right track through fostering innovation by thinking outside the box.

The latest from SBC Webinars, sponsored by Algosport, looks at the opportunities for both established and challenger companies when it comes to outsourcing and the breath of fresh air it can bring to large in-house development teams, who are often already overrun with other business priorities.

Firing off the discussion, moderator Marc Thomas, who is an industry consultant, asked his fellow panellists about their views on the current sports betting technology landscape.

Leigh Herdman, Founder and CEO of Algosport, responded: “One of the big problems we’ve got when it comes to innovation is that it’s extremely far behind where it could be. Where we are as an industry, we should be very much further than we actually are. That was my motivation for setting up Algosport.”

Herdman’s comments were followed by those of Jonathan Powers – Founder and Managing Director of Voxbet – who agreed with Algosport’s CEO by saying: “Innovation is slow, and when it does happen is copied. They’re all the same. There’s nobody differentiating.”

There was however a “glimpse of light” in the words of Jeevan Jeyaratnam, COO of Abelson Odds, who added: “Innovation is difficult. There is a reason why the industry is slow to pick things up.

“But there are some examples of operators or products leading the charge. An example is Adam Wilson and Splash Tech – a really different type of thing, really thought out. It is an example of a small niche supplier trying something new.”

Staying on the topic, Thomas then followed up with a question about the main challenges that the sports betting and the wider gambling industry face now and in the future.

Jeyaratnam then shared: “A number of operators struggle with implementing new products. For a supplier, getting on to an operator’s roadmap is the biggest hurdle.

“You can have a great product, getting on to a roadmap that’s gonna be full for 12-36 months is a real problem and that can cause a lot of pain for third-party suppliers who don’t have the bandwidth to continue operating without revenue.

“From a positive point of view, a third-party is likely to have more chances to solve many of the problems that your in-house supplier may not have thought of.”

Powers then built on Jeyaratnam’s words by saying: “From an innovation products perspective I’d say integration. From an external supplier point of view, I do agree with Jeevan that people are spread very thin in operators and that’s why I think there is a role to use highly-specialised providers.

“Strategically, instead of looking at the next product they want to build in-house, they need to look at their platform and how to make it more accessible so that they can deploy the product fast.”

Herdman added: “In the near term, we are likely to see lots of innovation within operators’ trading rooms, with automation of manual tasks increasing, although end user customers may not notice this directly. Longer term it will all be about personalisation and enhancements to navigation.”

To watch the full webinar and more, click here.

 

Content and images sourced from  SBC News. All rights reserved by the original publisher.

SBC Webinars and Algosport to discuss prospects of sports betting tech

Sports betting-focused company Algosport will host an online conversation on trading technology in sports betting, taking a deep dive into the sector.

The webinar, part of SBC Webinars, will take place later today, 31 January, at 14:00 GMT, and will feature several speakers, including Jeevan Jeyaratnam, COO of Abelson Odds, Leigh Herdman, Founder and CEO of Algosport, Marc Thomas, Industry Consultant at Marc Thomas Consulting, as well as Jonathan Powers, Managing Director at Voxbet.

Focusing on the rapid developments in sports betting, evident from the innovative Bet Builders and Same Game Parlays options, Algosport will explore whether both established and challenger brands are doing it right when looking into in-house algorithmic products.

Another highlight of the discussion will be third-party providers and their ability to integrate technology and products that have all the elements of an in-house service, without requiring extra time, resources and drawbacks.

To register for the webinar and watch it in full when it goes live, you can click here. Additional on-demand videos are also available.

 

Content and images sourced from  SBC News. All rights reserved by the original publisher.