THE BIG INTERVIEW


the impact of Virtual Basketball without seeing it! Now that sports betting is legal in many


With the virtuals product, adding additional


sports like basketball and hockey is tied in with geographies as well. In Greece we had a football product that took OPAP from zero to 541m in turnover within a year; what we are doing is adding a second channel of football where it is a completely different event, with eight games on at once instead of one – so you can have a number of accumulators, and a whole different betting mechanism. We would love to introduce basketball there, too. There are opportunities for us in existing markets; Italy is a huge market for virtuals as well and we have some interesting innovations planned for that market in particular. Geographies and product development run


across all of our business units. The interactive business unit, for example, was perhaps three or four years behind the curve in terms of developing that part of the business, but now it is our fastest-growing area. There is no lack of growth opportunities for us.


CI: When you look at new sports, I’m assuming you have to strike a balance between popularity regionally and a degree of fluidity in the game play itself. So if I were looking at developing a product for India, I might look at “field” hockey and cricket – but does cricket really lend itself to this kind of betting experience? Is the game too drawn-out and complex? BP: We actually have cricket with a number of our customers, and it is popular; I’m a huge sports fan, but I can’t comment directly on the mechanics of the game as I am an American and, well, it’s cricket and Americans just don’t get it. Clearly we would not put ice hockey in Greece; nobody would have an interest, and they would not play it. But we would do hockey in North America and especially Canada. We have been asked about that exact thing by Canadian companies just


34 APRIL 2019


this year actually. So there are a lot of opportunities, and we must work hard to recognize them.


CI: It’s been interesting to see Inspired’s evolution and it’s fair to say the company’s growth has been good for the industry as a whole, with developing new technologies and practically inventing new areas of betting… BP: It’s fascinating for me, as someone who has been in gaming and technology for most of their working life, to see how the technology of Inspired has evolved and what that means for our customers. Europe is far advanced technologically over the US in many ways, but particularly with server based gaming; you could argue that in the States, you go to a Vegas casino and with 2,000 slots maybe they don’t need to change games on the fly, or have a menu of 100 games – but for the markets in Europe, the technology has allowed us to be incredibly effective with distributed gaming, so a smaller number of machines in a larger number of locations. There are many opportunities for that outside Europe that we will pursue and we believe is a clear differentiator for Inspired.


CI: It will be interesting to see how you get on in the US because of the European- centric evolution of the company, though sports betting opening up should work strongly in your favor. BP: It’s funny because as sports betting grows, the majority of the people doing that in the US are European operators. They know us, we know them, they might already be customers of ours — but what we have to both figure out completely is introducing this product to an audience that has never seen anything like it. We signed a deal and went live in August 2018 with the Pennsylvania Lottery, so our virtuals product is in 9,000 locations – but only 1,600 locations have monitors. It’s hard to get


states in the US and is growing, the nice part is that our virtuals product just tucks right in with that and has significantly better margins for operators. Many in the US are learning its ease of integration, its low costs of deployment, the flexibility it offers through customized and multiple platform options, and the draw it has for all types of players: lottery, slots, sports betting, online, and mobile. The products can appeal to the players who seek complex sports bets, or to the players who enjoy a simpler betting experience. The speed of adoption often surprises our customers; we saw this in both Italy and Greece, where Inspired products generated annualised turnover of c€1bn and


€550m, respectively, over relatively short periods of time. Also with our virtual sports you have games


every three or four minutes instead of every three hours. For lots of reasons, we believe the virtual offering in both lottery and sports betting in North America is a really good fit.


CI: Inspired has been around for 15 years and in the last few years it seems you have everyone’s attention. BP: Yes, Inspired has been around for 15 years. Some customers saw our offerings as a niche, something “nice to have” — but in the last few years, Inspired’s products have become essential to our customers. Our server-based gaming content is outperforming the other suppliers in Greece, and our differentiated virtual products operates in 90 per cent of regulated virtual sectors worldwide and is now across multiple channels — for example we introduced our 1st Down electronic scratch game with IWG, which the Michigan Lottery launched right before the Super Bowl and it was very successful. Inspired’s interactive customers also got a 1st Down-themed (virtual American football) slot game. This was one of the highest-played games throughout the entire UK online operator space, reinforcing the power of our virtual sports assets across the spectrum. The leadership changes, our impressive


board members with decades of gaming industry experience, and our high-performing products combines for some strong momentum. Inspired has become the company to watch.


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