Gaining innovation: GiG CEO Robin Reed discusses the Malta-based firm's next move

Nestled in a corner at Malta’s St George’s Bay, marking an invisible cultural division between the quiet beach side and the tourist magnet of St Julian’s, the lively district of Paceville is home to Gaming Innovation Group’s brand-new GiG Beach headquarters. The building houses almost 300 of the online gambling tech firm’s 750 staff. Inside is a state-of-the-art office environment complete with in-house canteen, coffee shop and gym that could challenge the likes of Google and Facebook in employer satisfaction levels.

Part of its ethos for building an all-encompassing egaming product portfolio is maintaining a distinct tech start-up culture and restructuring its operations every year. Having finally achieved its long-term goal of establishing proprietary solutions for every division of online gambling technology, GiG now finds itself facing a new era and returning to its roots by overhauling its B2C business and streamlining the B2B offerings to better monetise the business.

Fostering loyalty

One point keenly reiterated by COO Mikael Ångman and the company’s new internal communications manager, Gemma Reid, is the business’s high employee retention rate. Many of the original senior staffers that joined the company during its inception still remain today, and a huge part of that is due to the emphasis on company culture and corporate responsibility. During Malta’s annual Pride march in September, Ångman told throngs of local supporters that GiG was determined to make the egaming industry “fair and fun for all”.

As a headline sponsor for the event, GiG affirmed its mantra of supporting a widely diverse team. For Ångman, a Swede, the notion of operating a company that is anything other than wholly accepting and reasonably flexible is entirely foreign. And it’s precisely the company’s innate Scandinavian values that entice locals to join the firm. Reid says it has one of the largest local workforces of all the egaming companies on the island.

Tech is also at the forefront of the firm’s belief system, with approximately 50% of the entire workforce directly employed in technology – be it back-end development, product management or data science. “We managed to get certified in New Jersey in six months and you can only do that with a focus on underlying technology,” says CEO and co-founder Robin Reed. “It’s absolutely key.”
In the six years since being established, GiG has grown its staff numbers by almost 525%, which is in line with its ambition to cover every facet of the egaming technology remit, from its in-house sports betting platform with its own odds aggregator and pricing feed to software that ensures an operator’s compliance and marketing efforts are secure and performance-driven.

GiG started from humble beginnings as a poker forum that was, like many of today’s most renowned tech giants, run out of a student apartment. “[Back in 2005], Facebook was coming out at the time and we realised people didn’t want to discuss their gambling habits with their parents and grandmother on Facebook, so we started a niche social network for gamblers and it quickly grew,” Reed explains.

“That was the precursor for Gaming Innovation Group. I was a minority shareholder back then, but the forum took off and we started visiting ICE and the conferences to find advertisers. At the same time, we were moderators in the actual community and we realised there was a huge gap in how the members in the forum viewed the gambling industry.” Having gained a vast knowledge of consumer habits and preferences from his niche poker network, Reed took the decision to drastically evolve the company, in what would become an annual strategic shift, and turn GiG into an operator.

“We launched a white label on somebody else’s platform and we realised if we were really going to make the industry more customer-orientated we had to control our own destiny. That’s when we started building our own back-office software and platform. During the development, we thought there could be a market for selling it B2B,” Reed explains. His vision was to build a tech architecture that could be open to all and connect each aspect of their consumer-facing business. The idea was to enable all operators to utilise the same technology stack and differentiate their products through unique branding and nuanced UI and UX.

The great American Dream

GiG is poised to score new B2B deals in the US as more states actively regulate sports betting and online gaming. And after having already established a presence in the burgeoning US market via its platform partnership with Hard Rock Casino in New Jersey, the firm has entered the fray early and may well be at an advantage. Reed comments: “We made the decision a couple of years back that in the future 100% of our revenues would be regulated, and [so] we created a regulatory role early on. We’re fortunate to have landed one of the biggest deals with Hard Rock as [New Jersey] is a tough jurisdiction to get regulated in, and at the moment they don’t have much experience with digital.”

In its September iGaming Tracker report, boutique analyst firm Eilers & Krejcik Gaming estimates Hard Rock has a 3.7% market share in New Jersey for online and land-based operations. The website was unveiled in late June with a full suite of casino games bar live casino at the time. Eilers & Krejcik Gaming believes the online casino launched sooner than originally anticipated and is “generating better-than-anticipated initial returns”.

Hard Rock’s casino revenue for August was up 46% on the previous month to $481,803. This is an impressive feat and revenue is likely to increase dramatically by leveraging the strong brand. “I think it’s about gaining that experience fast, and companies like ours are in a very strong position having competed in the very mature Nordic and European markets,” Reed says of his strategy with regards to expanding GiG’s reach as a supplier. “[Operators] are going to want to partner up with people that can accelerate their digital potential and revenue growth.”

Reed says he found the competing operators’ sites to be “dated” and that GiG’s aim was to bring the creative, brand-driven UI operated by modern Nordic- and Western-facing casino products to Hard Rock’s online business. “We created a much more gamified and interactive site that is aesthetically appealing rather than the traditional promotions-based casino page. I think we are seeing a great response from that now with casino growing fast,” he adds.

The deal marks GiG’s first foray into the omni-channel space, as the company’s role was also to establish a link between Hard Rock’s digital and retail offerings. The integration process was much simpler than anticipated, Reed explains, due to the progressive digitalisation of bricks-and-mortar casinos and beginnings of the Internet of Things. “Video slots in casinos are more and more evolving from analogue to digital, and with our modern platform the transition was easier than we would have thought.”

Reed is keeping his cards close to his chest as to the firm’s wider plans for US expansion, although he does insist the company will be in a very prominent position. “We are definitely looking at how we can expand in the market,” he notes. The next move will likely be launching its GiG Sports platform in the US. Uniquely, the USP for the technology is its in-house odds pricing model and aggregator, which Reed claims is the first step in a wider move within the sports betting industry to tighten risk management efforts and start considering a fairer offering for punters.

“If you’re running your own in-house odds you’re confident enough to know it’s correct, so you should be more than confident in your risk [management] and in your limits. I think something sportsbooks will start looking into soon is the preferential treatment of their clients. If you’re good, you can’t bet and if you’re bad you can bet as much as you want. The industry will have to innovate on that and develop its own pricing [models],” Reed says boldly.

Although, the more traditional betting giants would be likely to disagree and will stick to tracking the market, his point on risk management certainly has precedence as regulators in the UK are taking a much harder stance on those operators not treating consumers fairly.

GiG Sports signed up Mr Green Group’s recently acquired Baltics-facing brand 11.lv as its first external client and Reed says more deals are in the pipeline. In the spirit of adapting sports betting to new regulations and indeed new punters in the US, Reed believes there is room in the sports betting world for gamification and incentivising users to avoid high churn rates. “It’s all in how it’s done,” he says. “[But] you shouldn’t do anything for the sake of it – after all, we are producing a gambling experience and we don’t want to take it too far.”

A winning formula

Aside from the largely stagnant sports betting arena, the CEO considers the next wave of tech disruption in the industry to come from payments and “the decentralisation of account management”. Reed cites the growing popularity of Sweden’s BankID authentication process and Trustly’s Pay N Play function as an example of recent innovation. GiG is set to join the likes of Global Gaming’s Ninja Casino, ComeOn’s Snabbare, and Hero Gaming’s Speedy Casino in launching its own quick registration and withdrawal casino offering.

During GiG’s Q2 results, Reed outlined plans to transform its B2C brand, Thrills, in order to cater to the growing demand for faster payments solutions in the Nordics and Central Europe. Following the results in August, Reed told EGR Intel: “We believe with such a customer-centric feature that rather than losing customers we will gain a lot more, and we’ve seen other Pay N Play products out there and the growth they have had.

“The standard UI and UX that you find in these modern casinos hasn’t been achieved across these websites yet, and so we’ll come out with the best Pay N Play product with Thrills.” In September, the company integrated Trustly’s solution into its GiG Core platform so as to be able to offer it to its external operating partners. Internally, Kaboo is the first brand to launch the offering, with Thrills’ changeover to come next.

Having started the business as a B2C operator, GiG is returning to its roots and shifting its focus back towards its consumer-facing offering having recently completed a comprehensive review of its handful of brands. Six months on, Reed is confident the operator can boost efficiencies in marketing, regulation and customer experience.

On reflection, Reed tells EGR Intel the B2C business has up to now been used as a ‘sand box’ to experiment on products developed for B2B clients. “I think we need to put more focus into the actual business as a sustainable unit. The aim was to refocus the product portfolio and get our marketing behind the best-performing products. We are looking into how we can further reposition the brands. So, essentially instead of having certain brands in one or two markets, we will move a few of the most competitive brands into several regulated markets.”

GiG decided to discontinue its SuperLenny casino offering and transition it into a Nordics-facing affiliate after discovering it had ranked highly in a number of community features and reviews. ROI on the brand restructuring is anticipated to be “pretty immediate”, Reed says. Regulation played a crucial role in these efforts, particularly in determining which markets to target. Sweden’s upcoming re-regulation is an absolute key factor in the future progression of the B2C business and Reed hints at the possibility of opening up a base in the Scandinavian egaming hotbed in future.

However, he believes the vast majority of operators are underestimating the impact of regulation, particularly in jurisdictions like Sweden and the US. GiG has placed a huge emphasis on regulation and is driving efforts to ensure operators are complying with ever-changing regulations in all its markets via its new GiG Compliance tool. The software improves brand visibility and strengthens control over third-party advertising and protects operators from being promoted on illegitimate affiliate sites. Mr Green is the first operator to adopt the software.

And to cement the group’s transition into a much more mature company now focused on monetising each pillar of its business, GiG is in the process of moving its Nasdaq listing from the Oslo exchange to the Stockholm exchange. “GiG is a machine that is building up steadily and slowly whilst becoming more robust and reaching larger clients – and we want to make sure that people understand all the moving parts,” Reed concludes.