HELLO 2020!
Paddy McDermott Performance Director, SportCaller
What was the most important occurrence for you in 2019?
I’m happy to say it’s been something of a milestone year for us, underscored by a brace of wins for excellence at the EGR B2B Awards 2019, so it’s been hard to single out any particular highlight. That said, if pressed, I’d have to give a nod to Kindred embracing our platform and taking free-to-play (FTP) to an entirely new level. Having launched the group’s first game in August 2019, they were running in excess of 600 games across 17 countries and in 13 languages at the turn of the year. The SportCaller platform solution placed the controls in the hands of Kindred’s worldwide country managers - from opting in to globally run games to quickly spinning up their own games on local sports, leagues and teams. It’s great to see our investment in the platform coming to fruition via their
dedicated commitment, with games already covering events as diverse as the Polish Ekstraklasa, Hungarian Esélylesők Tippverseny, handball, NHL, NBA and Starladder Major. They are also our first client to give away a car with their Julekalendar promotion in Denmark.
What are you most excited about for yourselves in 2020?
You don’t need to shake a magic eight-ball at Christmas to know that the increasing smarts and sophistication of our product offerings are raising the bar for FTP to new heights. We have firmly established ourselves as the leading FTP supplier to the industry, but now is no time to rest on our laurels. Instead, the plan for 2020 is to take the genre to a higher plane, creating a far more immersive experience in order to enhance the overall UX.
Dmitry Starostenkov CEO, EvenBet Gaming
What was the most important occurrence for you in 2019?
It’s been a year of progressive highlights for EvenBet Gaming’s world-class poker platform. We’ve reached another milestone number with 80 customers’ projects now up and running, which demonstrates a remarkable 400% growth rate in just three years. We made a big bet on the emerging markets and happily hit the target. Right now, we’re expanding our presence in South and Latin America, with the help of our new Head of Business Development, Luigi Spina. His contribution to the company’s growth cannot be underestimated. We also witnessed some encouraging activity around our stand at the last big show of 2019, SiGMA in Malta. All these components
What are you predicting for the iGaming sector in 2020?
As we all know, fortunes and resolutions can prove a fickle thing. With any luck, though, 2020 is the year in which FTP clears a space for itself as another standalone vertical in the industry. In fact, the investor
combine to prove our business case: online poker is not only still alive and competitive, but also ready for development and further innovation. That’s exactly what we were doing with our market-leading poker platform.
What are you most excited about for yourselves in 2020?
During the final days of 2019, we rolled out our latest flagship project, and we are sure that it will make a difference. It’s a poker network in South America which will enable our operator- partners to target players in Colombia and LatAm, with further expansion coming into Peru, Argentina and Brazil. By the time you read this, the first operators will already be running their poker rooms. We are very excited about this ambitious project, as we want to become the number-one poker software supplier in South and Latin America. This new network marks a huge step in this direction.
presentation for the proposed Flutter-TSG “mega merger” listed free-to-play games as one of six independent verticals (alongside more established ones, such as poker, casino and exchange) so the seeds of FTP’s evolution and individual identity have already been sown.
What are you predicting for iGaming in 2020?
I feel predictions and resolutions can be risky inasmuch as we can all be blindsided by the future, no matter how certain we feel in any given moment. So, a humility before the facts is always recommended! So, let’s go with a bold dream overlapping into a bold prediction: the next step-change in online gaming regulation will finally see the sleeping giants of Brazil, India, and few other regions awaken. That would provide us all with a genuine shot in the arm, and a chance to work on new projects across these exciting markets. When you base much of your business model around emerging markets, a core activity for us at EvenBet Gaming, flexibility and localisation must be the watchwords. And even in regions where opportunity and regulatory challenge are two sides of the same coin, necessity should again prove the mother of invention.
GIO JANUARY 2020 117
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