HIPPODROME’S NEW APP
Breaking new ground T
he Hippodrome has been at the forefront of innovation since the casino’s concept was fi rst put before a planning committee – as an organisation they seem to be dedicated to the road less travelled,
fi nding their own path forward and performing with originality and verve. Well, they’ve done it again, as Director of Online Gaming George Constantinou explained, with a little help from Chief Executive Simon Thomas.
Casino International: George, tell us about this amazing app… George Constantinou: We set out to create a digital membership card that sat inside an app. We’ve been working with Intelligent Gaming, the casino management software company, for over a year on the API. As we understand, we are the only casino in the entire IG group using and developing any product like this. So we are breaking new ground with them and this project. To walk you through the process, the fi rst thing we did was to make sure we were aligned with the brand. You get the rich feeling of great content from opening the app. The clever thing is, the casino management system – which holds all of our player information – is what we’ve now managed to connect to, so we are seeing things with our app other simply cannot see. The fi rst thing you see when you open the app is that it is smart enough to know what your customer tier level is. It displays the relevant colour on the screen, and that tallies with your loyalty card, which is fully interactive. The barcode on the back is scannable at our bars and restaurants and we are working on a tool to scan the card at tables. It can also work as a form of ID in the casino as well. You can see on our app your reward points, and with this you can not only see and track your points but you can also spend and redeem those points. In the centre of the app you have the user evaluation period, so the member knows just where they are in the process of going up to the next tier; it’s a good guide for the user.
38 OCTOBER 2021
We have also built a wallet into the membership, protected by a pincode. The customer can now walk up to the cash desk with their chips and say ‘please put my winnings into my cashless wallet’, and he can see the balance on his phone. Next time he’s in he can withdraw those winnings, and this is unique to us. We have also attached PayPal to this, so the customer can now transfer funds from PayPal straight into their cashless wallet and go to the cash desk and withdraw, play, buy merchandise, whatever they want to do. As AML, KYC and affordability come more
into play and more checks are required by the Gambling Commission, we will be well ahead of the game in how we track and monitor what our players are doing.
The Hippodrome has developed a new app and George Constantinou, Director of Online Gaming, told Casino International that it’s unique in the market. We asked George about their superb, multi-functional and game-changing app
We can also use this to keep customers up to
date with our offers, we can send them direct to their mobile phone and it’s catered for each tier. We can also send vouchers, play tokens, whatever we are doing at that time for marketing.
The app also features a shop with customer
merchandise, where you can even redeem your points – another thing which is unique to us. The clever part of this process is the systems talking to each other right the way through – the app is telling the management system that this customer has redeemed X amount of points, everything is balanced, it all happens in real time. It’s a clever piece of tech. It can even do real-time refunds. We always have the customer in mind when we are developing these ideas. You can also use the app to book restaurant or bar seats, and even set things like responsible gaming levels, whether that is visits, amount of time at a table, whatever – once that’s set in the app it will ping the customer to let them know they have either stayed too long or spent too much, whatever their trigger is. That also tells the management system the player has reached their own limit.
CI: So this works hand in hand with the player loyalty system to assess in real time the player’s spend at the table, then communicate that to the player? GC: Yes.
CI: Wow. GC: I know! Effectively the management system allows for a lot of different things, like setting those limits. It’s almost like a remote control for our management system. Whatever features the management system has, we’ve built this API which allows us to pull that information down. But alongside that we have built an entire back-end management system that allows us to do all of those things internally.
CI: What will the app be able to do in the future?
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