A clear focus

EGR Technology: A year after launching your sportsbook product, how has it developed?

Andreas Bardun (AB): I think we’re in a very interesting situation because we are working with Kambi, our third party odds provider and one thing LeoVegas has always prided itself on is cutting edge technology and mobile focus. We are the only company on the Kambi network that is building its own front-end because Kambi have always used their own front end to publish sites like Unibet, 888 and Mr. Green. They all look very similar when you look at their front pages. We thought we could improve the mobile experience even more, so we pushed Kambi into getting an open API so we could start rendering our own front-end to allow us to be mobile friendly and quicker to bet. When we launched our product, we wanted to be one of the sportsbooks with the fastest loading times. Even when you browse between verticals from casino to sportsbook, it has instant loading times. The collaboration with Kambi is different from others because they haven’t received this kind of request from other companies, so they were surprised in the beginning, but now they are realising this is the way they should be going as well. I find it is a very fruitful cooperation between Kambi and us, in the sense that we are pushing each other.

EGR Technology: Why did you decide to go with Kambi in the first place?

AB: Our number one core market is Scandinavia so we needed to have a provider with a strong offer and live in-play for these markets and we felt Kambi was the best option. The second and extremely important part of the decision was the mobile offering and in our mind Kambi was and is by far the best provider for sportsbook when it comes to mobile offering. They understand our view on mobile experience and our ambition to be number one in mobile gaming.  Thirdly we love tennis and Kambi has probably one of the best tennis in play products. Tennis is all about in-play because you can bet on every point even up to the serve, and companies like Bet 365 weren’t even offering this. To play on every point also taps well into betting on your mobile in combination with a super fast sportsbook – something we offer at LeoVegas.

EGR Technology: Did you consider investing in your own platform and doing everything in-house?

AB: If you look at the effort and investment that is needed, it was an easy decision to go with a provider. The tech team has had a lot of experience working with a providers from the casino side, pushing them to offer us the best experience. It would have taken too much time and effort, and it’s expensive, I think there are operators out there who have tried building their own platforms and trading teams and it gets expensive very quickly.

EGR Technology: Is it an idea for the future perhaps?

AB: That is possible but at the end of the day  all we need is a flexible API so we can put in the odds and completely render our 100% mobile focused experience with it.

EGR Technology: How much investment has gone into Sportsbook?

AB: We have one tech team on the sportsbook side and then our business team consists of one operations team and one CRM team [made up of] of a handful of people. This is constantly growing because we are adding markets and new focuses all the time so we recruit new people both on the tech side and on the operations side. People might be surprised at how small the team is but this is just the front-end, then we share the back-end with the casino team. These are specialised for dealing with the sportsbook front-end and then Kambi helps with their back-end products.

EGR Technology: Are you all based in Malta?

AB: The tech team is based in Stockholm, they fall under a company called Gears of Leo, which is the pure tech company in LeoVegas mobile gaming group, and they are doing all technical development. Then we have the operations here in Malta.

EGR Technology: How would you say you compete with some of the sportsbook giants, particularly in the UK?

AB: We want to be the best sportsbook for some, rather than secondary for everyone. So we aren’t pretending that we are trying to beat bet365 that would be silly to say. What we’re trying to be is that mobile first operator that offers people a quick, easy manner. We want to really move into the mobile space and build our loyal customer base. Even within marketing we are trying to find a niche in certain areas, to give our customers a personalised experience. In the Nordics we are already one of the best sportsbooks out there, but the UK is a different beast and Kambi is working hard to build up their product and close the gap. I’m very optimistic that, let’s say for the World Cup, we will have a really high end product at LeoVegas, before that we will be focusing on creating the best customer experience and being number in mobile. Since we believe that mobile and speed are the most important thing for customer experience, and ours is one of, if not the fastest out there, I think that we have one up against our competitors because we don’t have long loading times. I think in future we can really make huge progress.

Head of sports, Andreas Bardun

EGR Technology: What movements are you making towards better personalisation?

AB: One of the things that we realised, and why we’re doing this front end improvement, was that all the sites look the same, and we wanted to use analytics and all different learnings to understand what customers want to do on the site, and create a different experience for a different type of customer. People think it’s about personalisation but the aim is really to give them the right type of offering. If you’ve never really bet on horseracing why should you be presented with racing bets? It’s about getting the basics right so the customer comes in and finds what he wants to bet on as quickly as possible. How do you that? Well you are fronted with the bets you’re most likely to take but it’s hard to breakdown exactly what the customer wants to bet on because he is not that predictable. It’s about studying analytics and what people are betting on and learning from it, then making the most educated guess for the customer. That’s what we’re building right now for our sportsbook 2.0.

I think there is two folds, one is letting the customer do the settings in the app himself. That’s what he wants to see, what he wants to receive, what he wants to decide himself. The other way is studying what the customers are doing using machine learning, like what does he bet on, what does he browse, is he an accumulator bettor? We are actually studying right now with third parties what we can integrate to give customers this type of experience.

EGR Technology: How much of your sportsbook traffic is via mobile?

AB: Two thirds is our group average and Sports is higher than group average. We look after desktop, but it’s not our first priority. Even now we’re going to rebuild the front end, that’s going to be done completely from a mobile perspective.

EGR Technology: Will you be pushing out this sportsbook 2.0 initiative over the slow sporting summer ahead?

AB: Right now we’re also involved in other projects. We’re really upgrading our whole code stack and after that we can really start working on a new front-end. It’s a good time to get ready for the new season and to have a top-notch sportsbook ready for world cup next year. By then we’re aiming to have the best front-end for mobile sportsbook and there’s a lot of pressure on us to deliver that but that’s our goal. We are very much a product and tech heavy company. We launched a year ago and now it’s just about executing the strategy.

EGR Technology: What kind of difficulties have you faced over the year you’ve been live?

AB:  Pushing Kambi and sometimes being dependent on their road-maps. Then you have licensees that haveh audits that we need to allocate resources for. But all in all, we have only been live for one year and it is [all about] rolling up our sleeves and executing, in order to deliver on our ambition and vision.

EGR Techology: What’s the future of sportsbook?

AB: I am completely hooked on everything to do with instant markets, like quick bets. Right now they are in a hidden part of sportsbooks, it’s actually a pretty poor experience trying to find these bets. People are used to playing casino and everything is moving towards Snapchat and Instagram. I think sportsbook is getting a little bit too slow like lotto and pool betting used to be in the old days. Now you can bet on everything at any time and I really believe that is the future because people’s attention spans are getting smaller and smaller. Another thing we have been working on is to find a good way of doing live accumulator, no one’s really cracked that, because people really like accumulators but it’s very hard to do in a live environment.

EGR Technology: Are there any big innovations you guys are looking into, like AI or voice recognition?

AB: We are always looking at them and we have a lot of discussions about voice recognition and something to navigate by using your eyes. LeoVegas is known for its innovation so the future will tell how these fields will develop and potentially be integrated in a sportsbook.