Danske Spil CIO on how the state-owned operator is still innovating

In the six years since Denmark opened its doors to private egaming operators and the market flooded with competition, state-owned firm Danske Spil has managed to maintain its front-running position as a leading operator for Danish players.

CIO Karsten Fogh Ho-Lanng attributes Danske Spil’s continued demand to its multi-vendor technology set-up, which hosts the site’s various verticals across a number of different third-party platforms. The operator’s central casino product is based on GVC’s bwin platform to provide access to a myriad of global casino games and services that, Fogh Ho-Lanng says, are integral for meeting the demands of its Danish players.

Despite being 80% government-owned and with a staunch leaning towards social responsibility and a pledge to donate much of its profits to social causes, Danske Spil still considers itself to be in the running against its major competitors from a product standpoint.

Fogh Ho-Lanng dispels any suggestion that former monopoly operators are lagging behind their privately-owned counterparts in product innovation. And Danske Spil has earned its place at the top of the food chain in Denmark with its steady growth and a very respectable 37th position in the 2017 EGR Power 50 rankings.

Karsten Fogh Ho-Lanng, CIO of Danske Spil

EGR Technology sits down with Fogh Ho-Lanng to discuss the operator’s tech set-up and how it competes in a market overwhelmed with globally recognised names and egaming giants.

EGR Technology: Why did Danske Spil choose the bwin platform to host its casino site?

Karsten Fogh Ho-Lanng (KFHL): We have decided to go with a best-of-breed strategy for our different game verticals. That means we have a multi-vendor set up at Danske Spil and we have chosen what we think is the strongest casino platform in the market to support the casino business. We have other casino verticals as well on the site but the main brand, the Danske Spil casino, is operated by bwin. We selected them because we realised that as a national operator and a former monopoly in the market, we cannot handle the product development of the games ourselves and we need to stand on the shoulders of strong ecosystems.

So, we had to join forces with other local operators and strong providers such as bwin in order to create some competitive edge for Danske Spil. Bwin also supply us with games that are dedicated to Danske Spil and the Danish market. They also give us access to a huge number of games from other developers around the world. This is the answer to how we compete – by choosing ecosystems and then having the front-end and customer experience as our main areas of focus. And, of course, the integration of all these systems. Our sportsbook is on OpenBet and our number games solution provider is Scientific Games (SG).

EGR Technology: What new products has Danske Spil been working on in recent months?

KFHL: What we have been doing is finalising the upgrade of our multi-vendor strategy, while the last big game vertical we upgraded was the number games platform, which we finalised in 2017, and shifting away from our old IGT-based platform to the SG-based platform. At the same time, we are completely changing our player account management solution and that will go live this spring with a complete change of platform, including the operating model behind it. We’re taking our previous solution and exchanging it for a SG-based solution.

EGR Technology: How has the migration gone?

KFHL: It is a huge project to carry out because this is the nervous system in a business like ours. It’s integrated into all our different game verticals. For most of our games we use the same player account management system. So far, this is a development project and has not caused downtime yet, but during the cutover we will see some hours of downtime, although we plan this thoroughly and expect it to be up and running within a day, causing minimal impact.

EGR Technology: How has Danske Spil stayed ahead following the market opening back in 2012?

KFHL: As a company, we have been ready to compete from day one in terms of market presence, product portfolio and so on. From a technology point of view, it has been the main strategy to base our products on best-of-breed, partner-standard solutions and ecosystems instead of building new games ourselves.

We are looking outside the industry for inspiration all the time because we need to keep up and because one of the key things for Danske Spil is to provide the best customer experience. This is what we have to compete on. This is about the general user interface and the whole brand and experience of going to a Danske Spil casino app or sportsbook versus one of our globally-based competitors. The thing about being an 80% government-owned company is that we have a huge responsibility to social responsibility, and money laundering and match-fixing. This is actually a very important part of our brand and corporate values.

EGR Technology: Does Danske Spil host services on the cloud?

KFHL: Yes. None of our games themselves are on the cloud but the multi-vendor strategy we use is not only a technology set-up, it’s also an operational model. An increasing number of middleware and communication components, and the systems we use, for instance, to communicate between platforms are hosted on the cloud. That also goes for a number of our BI solutions. An increasing number are going to become cloud solutions; we use both Azure and AWS. In house, we do all integration and all front-end [functions].

EGR Technology: How big is your tech team?

KFHL: We are 100-plus and that covers development and architecture. The operational side of the components we host ourselves, or on the cloud, and it covers the internal services team for the rest of the Danske Spil organisation.

EGR Technology: What are the biggest benefits of migrating onto the cloud?

KFHL: First, it’s the agility and speed we use to provision new services and new databases, but it’s also increasingly the access to the services around the infrastructure. This is not just about buying server or storage capacity; it’s about buying the operational services around it that increasingly makes it interesting to operate on the cloud, as opposed to operating in our own environment, because we still have a large number of servers that we operate ourselves, including our test environments and our front-end, which is one of the largest websites in Denmark.

“One of the key things for Danske Spil is to provide the best customer experience. This is what we have to compete on”

It requires that we operate some of that ourselves, but we can increasingly see that this will be the way to go. Our website is based on Sitecore, and they are now talk­ing about the generation of their technology being cloud-based on Microsoft Azure. We also follow this development for our financial solution, Microsoft Dynamics, which is also cloud-based. We see solutions around supporting our business and those that integrate different components of our business will be cloud-based.

EGR Technology: How do you respond to the industry-wide claims that monopoly operators lack innovation?

KFHL: I don’t agree that we’re lagging behind. I see in the areas we focus we have all the possibilities of also leading the market and that’s what we try to do. For instance, look at the way we have built our sportsbook app by combining streaming of the games with the games themselves. If we were to try to develop everything ourselves from the bottom we would have a problem because we don’t have the scale to do that. But we can focus on giving the market a good app experience.

We have an AI-based scanner for gambl­ing addiction which, based on clinical studies and some machine learning, scans our customer base for possible gaming addicts. We can then contact them about specific patterns in their gaming and if there’s something we can help them with. This is another example of us being a frontrunner.

EGR Technology: Is that a recent development?

KFHL: That’s been going on for the last 18 to 24 months in collaboration with the University of Aarhus here in Denmark. We have machine-learning mathematicians and some psychologists that have being doing the clinical studies we have based the algorithms on. It’s actually in the last six months that we have been using it directly to select the players we contact.

The customer doesn’t see this at all as it’s a tool we use [in-house]. We know it’s our responsibility to support and prevent gaming addiction, so instead of calling players based on high spend, we combine that with other attributes such as the behaviour when a player loses. We are able to much more specifically point out that this person is in danger of developing a gambling addiction.

EGR Technology: In different markets players have different UX expectations, so what do Danish players expect from a product?

KFHL: They expect a good overall customer experience and for us to live up to the brand values that we believe we have. We know we are competing directly against global competitors and this is a busy market today. We also have to live up to global standards and we have to provide the features, the odds and entertainment experience you would expect when you play with some of our competitors. On top of that, we have to compete across all different gaming verticals as opposed to most of our competitors who have one or two. So, we have to compete across all our platforms and this is why we have the focus on the front-end that we have.

EGR Technology: Having integrated the Danish government’s ROFUS self-exclusion scheme, what advice would you give to UK operators that will have to do the same shortly?

KFHL: Recently, we have actually implemented an additional service on top of that, which means every time a player enters our solution and our account management system we check them against ROFUS. I don’t recall it being a huge implementation but my advice to UK operators in implementing a similar system is to be prepared for the development of the requirements. Within the last six months, we have implemented additional checks whereby a player can choose to opt out of any marketing and we have to run a daily check on the database to see if there have been any changes to the marketing permission part.

We need to be good at integrating different technologies into our platform, and this is a technology that we are required to integrate, just as we are required to integrate the Danish social security register and so on. This is something that requires local knowledge to operate from a legal point of view.