Q&A: Smarkets' Matthew Shaddick on taking politics betting to the next level

Smarkets has strengthened its politics betting segment with the hire of Ladbrokes veteran Matthew Shaddick. Here Jake Evans talks to Shaddick about his move to the exchange operator and the significant political betting events he oversaw during his career at Ladbrokes.

EGR Intel: How did you end up leaving Ladbrokes for Smarkets?

Matthew Shaddick (MS): I’d been at Ladbrokes since 2002, although it wasn’t until 2008 that I took over responsibility for the politics product. Reflecting on my time there, I had a very positive, successful experience and many people helped me out. [Joining Smarkets] was mostly about the attraction of joining a company where politics is at the centre of what they’re doing. Entain is a multi-billion-pound company with fingers in all sorts of pies and at the end of the day, politics was a fairly tiny part of what they were doing. Whereas since I’ve joined Smarkets I’ve learned that from the chief executive to the marketing, product and communications departments that everybody sees politics as being a big part of the future of the company.

EGR Intel: Are you familiar with the Smarkets product portfolio?

MS: I was a customer before I applied for the job so I’ve seen the incredible range of markets they put up and the effort they put into curating those and keeping them relevant. That was certainly part of the attraction.

EGR Intel: What will your key responsibilities be at Smarkets?

MS: Overall responsibility for the politics product. I’m lucky in that I’ve got a very good colleague in [political analyst] Patrick Flynn, who was here before me. He has an exceptional knowledge of the field. My job is about deciding which markets we offer. There will also be more involvement with the trading and pricing side of things here for the sportsbook product [SBK] which the company wants to make a big effort to push out to consumers. It will also be about communicating what the benefits of our service are to the outside world, using media duties to try and speak to as many people as possible about what we’re doing.

EGR Intel: That is interesting that you will be pushing the sportsbook as the exchanges have traditionally led the way on politics betting.

MS: Absolutely, you’re right. And I still think for a certain group of customers, that’s going to remain the main platform they want to trade on. But like a lot of other exchange-related products, it just doesn’t appeal to a mass market in the way that a sportsbook can. If you were trying to react to the news that some cabinet minister has resigned and you need a market for their replacement, in some ways it’s much easier to immediately price it up as a bookmaker and stick it on a sportsbook platform, rather than waiting for an exchange when trying to react very fast to the news. That is something we will be looking to do a bit more of.

EGR Intel: How has politics betting developed over the course of your career?

MS: When I first took the job, I thought it was going to be a sort of part-time hobby to go along with my actual job when I joined Ladbrokes, in the high-roller telephone department as it was called at that time. But it soon became clear that once you started offering the consumers a better range of options and a more up-to-date set of markets, there was a real appetite for that out there. And at that time, nobody else was really trying very hard. Props to Ladbrokes who took the risk of letting me do it full-time from about 2014 onwards. That turned out to be a very prescient move, because we then hit the biggest five or six years of political events and uncertainty that we’ve ever seen. We had the Scottish referendum, the EU referendum, three UK general elections, Trump and Brexit and it turned out to be a great time to take that risk. Looking back, quite a few other companies made a bit more of an effort running up to Brexit in 2016. But I think it’s fair to say those results were fairly catastrophic for most fixed-odds betting operators and that seemed to put the brakes on for those operators who then seemed to take much less of an interest in trying to progress political markets after that, whereas Ladbrokes, Ladbrokes Coral and Entain offered a little more support for it and I think that paid off.

EGR Intel: What has been your most memorable event to date?

MS: I think Brexit. It was an incredible few weeks building up to that and the actual night of the vote. There was an amazing worldwide interest in the betting markets in anticipation of what was going to happen. I heard that the governor of the Bank of England had Lads prices displayed on his computer and the financial markets all around the world wanted to know what the latest price was. The betting markets got that one so wrong it knocked back public interest a little in using betting as a forecasting tool. But that is a key part of what Smarkets is aiming to do here. In the long run, we want to be a place that people go to even if they don’t want to have a bet, but if they want to know what the probability of there being a change in government more or less anywhere in the world. We want to be the place that provides the best estimates through our wisdom of the crowds.

EGR Intel: Is there any scope for political betting to take off in the US?

MS: There is an issue with regulation at the moment as none of the states actually allow political betting. If they ever did, I’m very confident it would be an enormous product for US customers. Presidential elections we know are huge betting events anyway but we’d also have Senate races, every governor’s race, every congressional race, the primaries. There are a lot of elections in the US. If US states decide to regulate, and I suspect at some stage they will, we’d be ready to take advantage of that.