Exclusive: Betfair closes rival operators' accounts
Company and personal accounts shut down - Betfair defends move calling it an investigation of customers with high data usage.
Exchange operator Betfair has moved to close the personal and hedging accounts of individuals tied to other egaming operators for alleged data abuse, eGaming Review can exclusively reveal.
Traders from several sportsbooks have been affected by the move, which Betfair claims has been occurring for a few years but which eGR sources say has become more prominent in recent weeks.
eGR understands that those impacted by the measures are exclusively those operators that have declined to take out data licences offered by Betfair for access to its live data, the cost of which has risen in recent years and on occasion reached six figures. The cost of a licence can vary from company to company, depending on data usage.
One representative of an unnamed operator alleged that Betfair used social network LinkedIn to identify whether individuals were tied to certain operators before closing the accounts of relevant individuals.
“On our accounts there’s absolutely no data abuse, we’re simply using them to make bets. Betfair might have thought we were scraping their prices, but now they have cut us off they will be able to see that we are not,” he said.
Tom Johnson, head of Betfair’s API & data business, told eGR: “In a nutshell, Betfair’s price data is used by many betting operators to assist them in pricing up their markets and as such, we currently have agreements in place with many that allow them to access the high volumes of live data that they require.”
He suggested that the closure of accounts was imposed only on those without such an agreement with the operator, which launched a fixed-odds sportsbook to sit alongside its core exchange offering earlier this year.
Johnson explained that the company has “More than 20 agreements with other operators so far,” adding that “We generally find that once notified of the licensing scheme, operators want to sign up to it.
“We don’t close accounts that we know are associated with an operator until the licensing process has been fully explored and we continue to see significant read profiles. So, there are not many accounts that we’ve shut down through association with an operator,” he added, admitting that on occasion Betfair has also blocked IP addresses rather than accounts.
“That may have interrupted individuals’ access to Betfair if they were accessing Betfair from work, but their accounts would have been accessible as normal outside the blocked IP range,” he explained.
An executive of an affected operator, who asked not to be identified, suggested “I think this is the biggest sign that they’re going more towards fixed-odds, the fact that they see certain operators as competition.
“Obviously Betfair have new management in place and are bringing in new policies, but the way I see it that’s completely abandoning their original business model and saying effectively what they want to do is keep the recreational punters,” added the executive.
Breon Corcoran took over as Betfair CEO at the start of this month, the period at which certain operators claim the account closures began in earnest, however Betfair maintains that the closures are not connected to his appointment, but rather part of a process which began before the arrival of the former Paddy Power COO.
Johnson said: “We closely monitor the use of Betfair’s publicly available data such as live exchange prices. Understandably, this data is very valuable intellectual property, as is the case for the live prices on any exchange platform, be it a betting or financial exchange. It is for this reason that we prohibit the use or collection of our live data without the relevant data licence.
“During the course of monitoring the exchange, we come across numerous cases of high data usage which require further investigation. In some cases, we see accounts that we believe are operated by a betting operator or have an association with a betting operator. If there is no data license in place we are likely to close these accounts,” he added.
One eGR source was confused by the closure of his company’s personal accounts, saying “Betfair think they can ban us or others when we’re coming through the front door and saying exactly who we are. They’re going to shut people down and some are going to come back through the back door and they’re not going to know who is playing.”