Q&A: Yggdrasil Gaming CEO Fredrik Elmqvist on recent success

Having gone live with its first partner last September, Yggdrasil Gaming has enjoyed a growth spurt of late after signing up five new partners in as many weeks, including the likes of Mr Green and LeoVegas.

The gaming supplier’s recent success is typified by its latest deal with Swedish giant Unibet, which will see the operator integrate Yggdrasil’s full portfolio of games as revealed by eGaming Review this morning.

eGR caught up with Yggdrasil chief executive Fredrik Enqvist (pictured) to find out a little more about the company and its plans.

eGaming Review: Yggdrasil is still a relative newcomer to the market, can you tell us how the concept for the company came about?

Fredrik Elmqvist: The idea behind Yggdrasil was that the lottery vertical had not been exploited as much as, for instance, the casino, or the bingo markets leaving a huge gap for what we believe was the penetration of online lottery compared with land-based offline lottery.

We thought ‘what if we could bring some creativity and innovation to the same extent that has occurred in casino’, then that would be something that could be interesting for the market.

Also, the fact the same content was available almost everywhere and there was no acquisition going on left us with the view that a new online vertical would not only bridge offline to online, but also attract new players.

eGR: You currently have seven partners with more on the way however five of these have come in the last few weeks. Why do you think you have enjoyed success of late?

FE: We were more prepared to talk about our business once we went live with the first customer which was September last year. Everything was at first focused on product and operational preparation and after that we began to ramp things up.

Before that we kept people up to speed with what we were doing but wider commercial discussions started in Q4 as we prepared for ICE – although some things started to materialise before the exhibition.

eGR: Today marks your biggest deal to date with Unibet. Do you expect to sign many more partners as a result of such a landmark agreement?

FE: I’m really proud of our achievements so far and today’s a great day for us. People are really taking note of the products we’ve developed and the names we’ve signed so far so I expect plenty more announcements in the very near future.

eGR: The focus thus far has been on lottery products, do you plan to widen your portfolio?

FE: Yes and this year it will be all about slots. We have developed a lottery vertical, which is a solid foundation to build on together with our clients but now we are focused on building a slots foundation. Of course, this also included expanding into new markets and currencies, new regulatory aspects as well.

eGR: So what markets are you looking at gaining licences for?

FE: Firstly, we follow our customers so when a customer says ‘you need be ready to do this or prepared to do that’, then we have to look into it and find out what’s required of us to be compliant. We also need to understand if it’s business efficient – should or should we not support it? Or whether the revenues we have from that customer and market make business sense, so we are quite pragmatic.

We have not yet taken any decisions for any regulated markets but we have questions from partners for Denmark, the UK and Italy so we have at least three markets we are looking into at this point. No decision, however has yet been made as to how we will tackle those.

Finally, can you touch on Cherry Malta’s involvement as it holds a shareholding of more than 90% in the company?

Cherry celebrated 50 years last year and they were very much involved in making Betsson what it is today, as well as the early days of Net Entertainment. We’re under some pressure to be as successful as they were and still are, but they allow us to run things independently and get on with the task in hand which is great.