New Wager app aims to bring friend-to-friend betting into 21st century

Two former Oxford University students are planning to launch a Flutter-style friend-to-friend betting platform ahead of the next football season, EGR can reveal.

The so-called Wager platform is an app that handles the technical aspects of social wagers.

For instance, Wager might show a traditional 1×2 football market, where a user clicks Chelsea then offers the other side of the bet to a friend, who is offered a price on Arsenal or draw.

The pricing comes from Sportradar via the provider’s Acceleradar programme which offers free data for betting start-ups for a year.

According to co-founder Elliot Robinson, the app aims to tap into a growing social trend in the betting industry, following the success of fantasy football,  Sky’s Super 6 and products like Sky Bet’s Group Bets.

“We did hundreds of hours of customer research and a ton of bettors know they aren’t going to win long-term, so for them this is about bragging rights and the truth of being right,” Robinson said.

“We’d have WhatsApp groups and chats in the pub about who’s going to win a game, who’s going to score, and they’d be full of disagreement but there was no real way to settle that in an easy way,” Robinson said.

Wager co-founders Elliott Robinson and Leo Barnes

Robinson and co-founder Leo Barnes came up with the idea and had a prototype developed last year, before securing a £500,000 investment from early-stage VC fund Forward Partners in November 2018.

The two, who both attended Oxford University, then quit their jobs as retail consultants and started work full time on the Wager app from Forward Partners’ office on Old Street.

Initial launch for the iOS and Android apps is planned for August, with the app being initially confined to football only.

“We see lots of opportunities in the outrights,” Robinson said. “It’s the classic friend-to-friend bet – ‘Salah is going to score more than Kane,’ ‘Chelsea are going to finish ahead of Arsenal’. That sort of chat, which is so common offline, is something that really excites the bettors that we spoke to and lends itself to friend-to-friend.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Robinson said in-play, two-way markets like ‘next team to score’ were proving popular with early users.

The betting industry has been looking for ways to make betting more social for years, from Flutter back in the early 2000’s to Colossus Syndicates, Group Bets and the ‘WhatsApp for betting’ in recent years, without anything really exploding.

So why would Wager be any different? “The Flutter example is an interesting one,” Robinson says. “The world is a very different place. Its so much more social and so mobile-first now in a way it wasn’t in 2001. More than 75% of Sky Bet traffic is mobile and the phone has become the second screen while you’re watching football. Millennials are checking their phone 150 times a day and that plays into our product.”

Wager screenshots